The
Ambassador Book Awards (ABA) are the keystone of the ESU's Books-Across-the -Sea Program, founded in 1946 with T.S. Eliot as its first chairman. Theya re 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 teh United States to ESUs around the world for placement in libraries and educational centers in more than twentyfour countries and cities as far flung as New Zealand, Hungary, Malaysia, Moldava, 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 McCulloush, 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 costitute ednorsement of the views themselves, but rather a stimulous 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.