Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell has won the £50,000 (about $59,440) 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction.
Organizers said that Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, published in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, "gives readers a window into the little known myriad of lives that poet John Donne lived. Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, a priest, the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral--and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language."
Chair of judges Caroline Sanderson said, "Exquisitely rendered, [Super-Infinite's] passion, playfulness and sparkling prose seduced all of us. Rundell makes an irresistible case for Donne's work to be widely read 400 years later, for all the electric joy and love it expresses. And in so doing, she gives us a myriad reasons why poetry--why the arts--matter."
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Mother Country by Jacinda Townsend (Graywolf Press) has won the $15,000 2022 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, given annually by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation to support an emerging African American fiction writer. The award is given to honor the late Ernest Gaines, whose stories gave voice to African Americans in rural areas.
Townsend called Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying "one of the books that most taught me how to weave searing social justice with the pleasure of storytelling, so it is a special honor to be part of this long tradition of excellence in African-American literature. Writing is such a lonely enterprise for African-American storytellers, given that most of the industry's gatekeepers are not us. It's lovely to know that the community I started writing for, the community for which I will always primarily write, has read my work and found that it resonates. I am particularly looking forward to working with children in the Baton Rouge schools, as I am passionate about arts education."
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Winners and honorees for the National Outdoor Books Awards, sponsored by the National Outdoor Book Awards Foundation, Idaho State University and the Association of Outdoor Recreation and Education, have been announced. See the 19 winners and silver medalists in the 10 categories here.