Finalists announced for the Lukas Prize Project book awards

Beverly Gage’s J

Books-Lukas Prizes

Beverly Gage's J. Edgar Hoover biography “G-Man,” Robert Samuels' and Toluse Olorunnipa's “His Name is George Floyd” and Linda Villarosa's study of racism and its effects, “Under the Skin,” are among the finalists for awards handed out by the Lukas Prize Project.

The project was established in 1998 and named for the late author and investigative journalist J. Anthony Lukas. The finalists were announced Wednesday by the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Winners will be announced March 21.

Villarosa and Samuels and Olorunnipa are nominees for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, a $10,000 award for an outstanding “work of narrative nonfiction on a topic of American political or social concern.” The other finalists are Rachel Aviv's “Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us,” Lyndsie Bourgon's “Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America’s Woods” and Jack Lowery's “It Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic.”

Gage's book is a nominee for the $10,000 Mark Lynton History Prize, along with Kerri K. Greenidge's “The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family,” Pekka Hämäläinen's “Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America,” Kelly Lytle Hernández's “Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, & Revolution in the Borderlands” and Deborah Cohen's “Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War.”

The Lynton prize is named for the late author and businessman, whose family has sponsored the project.

The project also will award two $25,000 prizes for outstanding works in progress. The finalists are Jesselyn Cook's “The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family,” Mike Hixenbaugh's “Uncivil: One Town’s Fight over Race and Identity, and the New Battle for America’s Schools,” Rebecca Kelliher's “Guerrilla Pills: The Abortion Drug Underground,” Megan Kimble's “City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways” and Jessica Pishko's “The Highest Law in the Land: How the Growing Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy.”

Previous prize winners include Robert Caro, Isabel Wilkerson and Jill Lepore.