2025 Silvers-Dudley Prize Winners
2023 Silvers-Dudley Prize Winners
Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism
Louis Menand
Louis Menand is Professor of English at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker. “Louis Menand has refreshed contemporary history writing and literary criticism through his keen – and surprising – analysis of art, culture, and politics,” our judges noted. “He is a comprehensive historian, and a deeply original writer.” Menand’s books include The Metaphysical Club, which won the Pulitzer Prize in History. He was Contributing Editor at The New York Review of Books from 1994-2001. In 2016, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.
Christopher Tayler
Christopher Tayler is a contributor to Harper’s and The New York Review of Books. “Tayler is everything you could ask for in a critic: smart, witty, judicious, and an uncommonly graceful writer,” our judges wrote. “He also does his homework, so that his essays have unusual depth and breadth. More than just book reports, they are windows into an author’s entire way of seeing the world.” He has been a profile-writer and chief book critic for the Guardian, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, and an arts writer and reviewer for a range of British newspapers.
Grace Dudley Prize for Arts Writing
Judith Thurman
Judith Thurman is the author of Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, which won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction; Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, which won the Los Angeles Times and the Salon Book Awards for biography; and of two essay collections, Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire and A Left-Handed Woman. “She writes with equal tenderness about Shamanism, hyperpolyglots, couture, nearly extinct languages, and the performance artist Marina Abramović, and pays close attention to the profound and mysterious ways in which humans communicate. She is a sleuth and a wit who carves out gorgeous sentences as she goes along exploring.” She began contributing profiles and cultural criticism to The New Yorker in 1987, where she has been a Staff Writer since 2000.
Helen Shaw
Helen Shaw is the theatre critic for the New Yorker. Our judges wrote that “Shaw may be the smartest theater critic at work right now. She has apparently seen everything there is to see, and thought so carefully about it all that her judgments invariably ring true. And she’s a pleasure to read: lucid, understated, quietly clever and incisive.” Her work on theatre has also appeared in New York magazine, Time Out New York, 4Columns, Art Forum, and the Village Voice. She co-won the 2017-2018 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and she teaches at New York University and Yale.
Robert B. Silvers Prize for Journalism
William Finnegan
William Finnegan has written primarily about politics, war, poverty, race, U.S. foreign policy, organized crime, mass transit, economic globalization, and surfing. “Finnegan is a precision reporter with a cinematic style and a genius for foregrounding the human toll of nation-building,” our judges noted. “He is consistently excellent when covering conflicts in South Africa, South Sudan, Mozambique, Bolivia, drug cartels in Mexico, and skinheads in America. Reading Finnegan, you get the sense that every civil war has a personality and every war-ravaged landscape offers moments of serenity. Steely in the face of unimaginable violence, he puts himself in harm’s way to get a fuller and more accurate story. ” His work has appeared in Granta, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1987. He has published five books.
Gary Younge
Gary Younge is a journalist, author, broadcaster and professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. He is “one of the most extraordinary journalists working in Britain today,” our judges wrote. “Younge has been an incisive chronicler of the past three decades of protest and uprising, reporting from the front lines with an eye on history and that rare sense of hope.” Previously editor-at-large and US correspondent for The Guardian, he was a regular columnist at the Nation, where he remains an editorial board member, and cohosts the podcast Over The Top Under The Radar. His most recent book, Dispatches from the Diaspora: From Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter (OR Books), is out now.