Horse by Geraldine Brooks (Viking) has won the $10,000 Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award, which honors "the best of book-length writing set in the world of horse racing," whether fiction or nonfiction. Organizers praised "the beautifully imagined tale of legendary 19th century racehorse and sire Lexington, and a young, enslaved groom who loved him. The story weaves back and forth through time and space, from the pre-Civil War antebellum South to modern day New York and Washington, D.C."
The two finalists, who each won $1,000, were Kathryn Scanlan, for the novel Kick the Latch (New Directions), and Mary Perdue, for her biography Landaluce: The Story of Seattle Slew's First Champion (University Press of Kentucky).
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Courting India: Seventeenth-Century England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire by Nandini Das (Pegasus) has won the £25,000 (about $30,560) 2023 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.
Organizers said that Das "presents an important new perspective on the origins of empire through the story of the arrival of the first English ambassador in India, Sir Thomas Roe, in the early 17th century.
"The book recasts the story of Britain and India, moving us beyond a Eurocentric telling with an even-handed, entertaining tale of the encounter of two cultures and the ambitions, misunderstandings and prejudices that came to the fore. In this genuinely ground-breaking work, Indian-raised Das challenges our understanding of this pivotal pre-colonial period. Drawing on a rich variety of sources--literature, the memoirs of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, the journals and correspondence of Sir Thomas Roe, plus the archives of the East India Company--Das invites the reader to get to grips with the making of history, and its narration from both perspectives."