Griswold Nonfiction Work Honored

New York, NY (April 20, 2011) – Investigative journalist and poet Eliza Griswold has won the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, an assessment of conflicts between Muslims and Christians in Africa and Asia.

Eliza Griswold

Griswold, who completed substantial portions of the book at Yaddo, traveled extensively to such countries as Nigeria, Somalia, Malaysia and the Philippines to look at how history, resources, climate, and demographic trends have combined with and shaped the struggle among religions.   She chose to tell her story primarily through an intimate investigation of individual lives.  The prize judges noted: “Griswold examines the conflict between Christianity and Islam along the geographical line where the two beliefs collide. More than half the world’s Muslims live along this line, as do 60 percent of the world’s Christians. . . a brilliantly original construct for examining one of the most important – perhaps the most important – conflicts in the world today.”

The announcement was made by The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, which administers the Lukas Prize Project Awards for Exceptional Works of Nonfiction, established in 1998 to honor the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist J. Anthony Lukas.

The award includes a $10,000 prize. It will be formally presented at Columbia University in New York on May 3.

To listen to Eliza read from her book, click here.