2026 Silvers-Dudley Prize Winners
2023 Silvers-Dudley Prize Winners
Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism
Vivian Gornick
Vivian Gornick is the author of over a dozen books, including In Search of Ali Mahmoud, The End of the Novel of Love, The Romance of American Communism, and Fierce Attachments, which was selected by The New York Times as the best memoir published in the last fifty years. “Vivian Gornick has been writing essays and criticism for more than 60 years. To say that her work has evolved over all those decades would be a little misleading,” our judges wrote. “Her voice was original right from the beginning, combining the personal and the political, autobiography and close reading in a way that was brand new then and is still unequalled. But her writing has become wiser with time, and maybe a little more rueful, especially about her great subject: a woman’s never-ending struggle to balance love and work.”
Tobi Haslett
Tobi Haslett has written about art, film, literature, and politics for n+1, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, and other publications. “Haslett is a critic of fierce intelligence. He’s impatient with clichés and received wisdom, and he sees right through writing that is slack or pretentious,” our judges wrote. “His own writing, it almost goes without saying, is both eloquent and slicingly acute. But he’s not just a no-nonsense critic. He’s also a generous and empathetic one, genuinely ardent about the writers he admires, and he has a way of making the reader care as much as he does.” Haslett contributed introductions to Horse Crazy (1989), a novel by Gary Indiana that was reissued in 2018 by Seven Stories Press, and to Thulani Davis’ Nothing but the Music (2020), a collection of poems published by Blank Forms Editions.
Grace Dudley Prize for Arts Writing
Amy Taubin
Amy Taubin was a film and television critic at the Village Voice from 1987 to 2001, and a contributing editor for Film Comment and Artforum magazines for roughly 20 years. Our judges wrote: “For the last seven decades, Amy Taubin has been a tireless advocate for cinema of all kinds. In both her short and long form essays, she contends with the complexities of narrative and the power of moving images, shaping how generations of critics and filmmakers have watched the movies.” Her monograph Taxi Driver is in the BFI’s Film Classics series; her critical writing appears in many anthologies. Before she became a writer, she was an actor, then a curator at The Kitchen. She received an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant in 2020. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where she has lived her entire life.
Adam Shatz
Adam Shatz is the US editor of the London Review of Books. “To read Adam Shatz’s essays on music is to experience the most passionate—and diverse—listening,” our judges wrote. “Whether he is writing on minimalism, sound performance, or modern jazz, his criticism is searching and soulful, and always generous.” A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, Shatz is the author of The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, and Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination. His book about the post-war Black musical avant-garde will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in early 2027.
Robert B. Silvers Prize for Journalism
Garry Wills
Garry Wills is Professor Emeritus of Northwestern University and the author of over fifty books, including Lincoln at Gettysburg, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Award for Criticism. “Wills is a scholar of American history and a reader of the American mood, from the disillusioned sixties to the lure of the pep talk,” our judges wrote. “He questions everything and values mystery. In more than fifty books, he is an erudite voice with an electric style, and a philosopher-critic of religion and society who examines power structures in America and in the Catholic church. He is a wit who dispels myths and a first-rate storyteller.”
Rozina Ali
Rozina Ali is a journalist who writes about conflict, the Middle East and South Asia, Islamophobia, and immigration. She is “the rare investigative reporter who traces not only a story but the moral weight of a story,” our judges wrote. “She is a precision writer of tensely alert sentences who is committed to exploring and exposing the xenophobic ether of Islamophobia, Muslims lost or abused by the American counterterrorism dragnet, the legal loopholes that enable targeted deportations of pro-Palestinian activists, the repercussions of American aggression abroad, the influence of evangelical Christianity in politics, and crises in South Asia and the Middle East. With unflagging stamina, Ali probes conspiracies, deception, betrayal, and political arrogance and entitlement, and never misses a tender detail.” Ali is a contributing writer at New York Times Magazine, and the recipient of the 2023 National Magazine Award in Reporting. Her book, Seasons of Fury: The Rise of Islamophobia in America, is forthcoming from Crown.