3 Authors Win $10K Prizes for Blending Science, Literature

Three authors who demonstrated how scientific research can be wedded to literary grace have been awarded $10,000 prizes. On Wednesday, the National Book Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced the winners of the fifth annual Science + Literature awards, the AP reports.

• The books include Kimberly Blaeser's poetry collection, Ancient Light, inspired in part by the environmental destruction of Indigenous communities; the novel Bog Queen by Anna North, the story of a forensic anthropologist and a 2,000-year-old Celtic druid; and a work of nonfiction, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian's Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature.

"These gifted storytellers shine a scientific and poetic light on the beauties and terrors of nature and what they reveal to us about our deepest selves, our humanity, and our existence on this planet," Doron Weber, vice president and program director at the Sloan Foundation, said in a statement.

• Ruth Dickey, executive director of the National Book Foundation, said in a statement that the new winners continue the awards' mission to highlight "diverse voices in science writing that … enlighten, challenge, and engage readers everywhere."
• The Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards, one of the literary world's most prestigious events. The Sloan Foundation has a long history of supporting books that join science and the humanities, including Kai Bird's and Martin J. Sherwin's Pulitzer Prize-winning American Prometheus, which director Christopher Nolan adapted into the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer.

• "At a time when science is under attack, it has become more urgent to elevate books that bring together the art of literature with the wonders of science," Daisy Hernández, this year's chair of the awards committee and a 2022 Science + Literature honoree, said in a statement.
• Last month, North spoke to NPR about Bog Queen. She said she was fascinated when she first saw a preserved "bog body" in the British Museum. "I visited the bog where he was found. I really learned so much from that landscape, which today is quite degraded from its former state, but it's still breathtaking to see," she said. "And there are spots of real biodiversity that could come back if protected properly. So I really got obsessed with bogs themselves and with the moss that creates the bogs and the way it can operate as a colony, not as a single organism. And I really wanted in this book to talk about the nonhuman world. I think that people tend to think that we always drive events on the Earth, but there are many other organisms here that have a huge impact on us, on our lives, and I really wanted to share that too."