Book Awards: $100,000’s And The Lincoln Prize

Lucette Lagnado, a senior special writer and investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, has won the $100,000 2008 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for her memoir, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World. The Jewish Book Council, which administers the award, noted: “In the memoir, Lagnado chronicles her family’s heartbreaking tale of their exodus from Egypt and eventual resettling in Brooklyn.

Tom Sleigh, who teaches in the creative writing program at Hunter College, has won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Space Walk. The award recognizes “a work by an emerging poet, one who is past the very beginning but has not yet reached the acknowledged pinnacle of his or her career.”

The winners of the $50,000 2008 Lincoln Prize for American History which is administered by Gettysburg College are:

• The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics by James Oakes
• Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters by Elizabeth Brown Pryor