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Ambassador Book Awards
Recognizing the Best in American Literature

English-Speaking Union 2011 Ambassador Book Award winners with committee members: (l to r) Adam Kirsch, Ambassador Book Awards Committee Chair; Jennifer Homans accepting on behalf of Tony Judt, for The Memory Chalet (The Penguin Press); Molly Stern of Crown Publishing accepting on behalf of Rebecca Skloot for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown); Alan Brinkley for The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (Alfred A. Knopf); Deborah Eisenberg for Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Picador); Committee member Benjamin Taylor; Lifetime Achievement Award winner Janet Malcolm; Committee members Ed Park and Maureen Howard.

The Ambassador Book Awards are the keystone of the ESU's Books-Across-the -Sea Program, founded in 1946 with T.S. Eliot as its first chairman. They are presented annually to authors whose books make an exceptional contribution to the interpretation of life and culture in the United States. Sets of the books are distributed through ESU Branches in the United States to ESUs around the world for placement in libraries and educational centers in more than twenty four countries and cities as far flung as New Zealand, Hungary, Malaysia, Moldova, Madagascar, the Phillippines, Poland, Brazil, Georgia, Mauritius and Mongolia. Previous Ambassador Book Award-winning authors include W.E.B. DuBois, Archibald MacLeish, Jane Smiley, David McCullough, Arnold Rampersad, Grace Paley, John Updike, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robert Pinsky and Tom Wolfe. As the English-Speaking Union of the United States is a non-profit, non-political educational organization whose mission is to celebrate English as a shared language to foster global understanding and good will, it maintains no political position. The authors' views expressed in the Ambassador Books are their own and the selection of these books does not constitute endorsement of the views themselves, but rather a stimulus to thought and discussion.

Each year, a distinguished panel of judges reviews new works in the fields of fiction, biography, autobiography, current affairs, American studies and poetry and designates the most noteworthy to become Ambassador Book Award winners. Past winners have included books by such distinguished authors as John Updike, Annie Dillard, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Tom Wolfe.

 

Ambassador Book Awards Committee 2011 Winners 2010 Winners 2009 Winners 2008 Event 2007 Winners and Event Details 2006 Winners

Books Across The Sea Program 2005 Winners 2004 Winners Pictures of 2004 ABA Ceremony 2003 Winners Past Winners 1986-2002