The PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award celebrates writing that exemplifies literary excellence on the subject of physical and biological sciences. The winner receives a cash award of $10,000 and will be honored at the PEN Literary Awards.
The PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award was founded by scientist and author Dr. Edward O. Wilson, activist and actor Harrison Ford, and the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. The inaugural award was conferred in 2011.
The Man Who Wasn’t There: Investigations Into the Strange New Science of the Self (Dutton Books/Penguin Random House), Anil Ananthaswamy
Rain: A Natural and Cultural History (The Crown Publishing), Cynthia Barnett
Black Hole: How an Idea Abandoned by Newtonians, Hated by Einstein, and Gambled On by Hawking Became Loved (Yale University Press), Marcia Bartusiak
The End of Plenty: The Race to Feed a Crowded World (W. W. Norton & Company), Joel K. Bourne Jr.
The Boy Who Played with Fusion: Extreme Science, Extreme Parenting, and How to Make a Star (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Tom Clynes
The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults (Harper Books), Frances E. Jensen, M.D. with Amy Ellis Nutt
Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry (Little Brown and Company), Jeffrey A. Lieberman, MD with Ogi Ogas
Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything (Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux), George Musser
Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future (Random House), Lauren Redniss
Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World (Pegasus Books), Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe
Shortlist
The finalists will be announced on February 2, 2016.
Winner
The 2016 winner will be announced live at the 2016 PEN Literary Awards Ceremony on April 11.
2016 Judges
Joshua Foer is the author of the international bestseller Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, which was a finalist for the 2012 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. A 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, Foer’s writing has been published in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Outside, and Esquire. He is also the co-founder of Atlas Obscura.
Virginia Hughes is the science editor of BuzzFeed News. Before joining BuzzFeed, Ginny was an independent journalist specializing in genetics, neuroscience, and biotechnology. She was a contributing editor at Popular Science, and her blog, Only Human, was published by National Geographic. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Slate, and twice in The Best American Science and Nature Writing anthologies. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and energetic herding dog.
Sonia Shah is a science journalist and prize-winning author. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Scientific American and has been featured on RadioLab, Fresh Air, and TED, where her talk, “Three Reasons We Still Haven’t Gotten Rid of Malaria” has been viewed by over 1,000,000 people. Her 2010 book, The Fever, was long-listed for the Royal Society’s Winton Prize. Her new book, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, is forthcoming in February 2016.
Past Winners
Siddhartha Mukherjee, James Gleick, Leonard Mlodinow, Dr. Carl Hart, and Joshua Horwitz.
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