2010 Orion Book Award Winner

The winner of the 2010 Orion Book Award is Charles Bowden’s Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

“Bowden’s writing is not only stunning,” said Ted Genoways, editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review and member of the 2010 Orion Book Award selection committee, “but the risks that he is willing to take are sometimes breathtaking. It’s journalism of a really compelling kind.”

Selection committee chair Don Snow describes Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing as a daring work in which “moments of acute consciousness and cognition seem to be refracted through a prism, scattering the light of various events across a mosaic of images, sensations, and sometimes stunning realizations. In the middle of it all, our narrator refuses to comfort us with familiar notions of activism, or betterment, or moral centeredness.”

Mr. Bowden will be awarded a $3,000 prize and the finalists will each receive $500. All five books will be honored at a reception on April 14, 2010, from 5:30 to 8 p.m. at the CYNTHIA-REEVES gallery in New York; the awards will be presented at 7 p.m. The public is welcome. The Orion Book Award is made possible through the generous support of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

Other 2010 finalists:

The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
Wade Davis
(House of Anansi Press)

Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie Landscape
Richard Manning
(University of California Press)

Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing: Stories
Lydia Peelle
(Harper Perennial)

The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature
Curtis White
(PoliPointPress)

Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future

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The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

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Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie Landscape

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Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing: Stories

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The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature

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2010 Orion Book Award selection committee:

Don Snow, Chair is a prolific author whose essays, public addresses and other writings have been widely published in magazines, journals, and anthologies. In collaboration with various authors and editors, he has produced seven books and is currently at work on book of personal essays titled The Cabin of No Fishing.

Anthony Doerr is the author of three books, The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome. Doerr’s short fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho with his wife and two sons.

Ted Genoways is the editor of VQR (Virginia Quarterly Review), and the winner of several recent National Book Awards. According to the VQR website, “Genoways, the editor of VQR, is author of Bullroarer (Northeastern, 2001), winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award, and the Nebraska Book Award.

Karen Russell is the author of St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, a collection of short stories. She doesn’t have a web page, but her publisher, Random House, writes “Karen Russell, a native of Miami, has been featured in both The New Yorker‘s debut fiction issue and New York magazine’s list of twenty-five people to watch under the age of twenty-six. She lives in New York City.

Harlan Clifford has been the executive editor of Orion since 2003. He is the author of three nonfiction books and the editor of several more. Prior to joining Orion he lived in Colorado and New Mexico, where he worked as a journalist in various capacities for 20 years.

For more information: Charles Bowden, Wade Davis, Richard Manning, Lydia Peelle, and Curtis White.

More about the Orion Book Award