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Finalist: Carlos Lozada of The Washington Post

For criticism that dug deep into the books that have shaped political discourse — engaging seriously with scholarly works, partisan screeds and popular works of history and biography to produce columns and essays that plumbed the cultural and political genealogy of our current national divide.

Nominated Work

Biography

Carlos Lozada joined the Washington Post in 2005 and became its nonfiction book critic in 2015. He has also served as the paper’s economics editor, national security editor and Outlook editor. Previously, he was managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine and a Knight-Bagehot fellow at Columbia University. In 2016, he received the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing for his essays and reviews on politics, race and sexuality.

Lozada earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science from the University of Notre Dame and a master’s degree from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. He is an adjunct professor of political journalism for Notre Dame’s Washington program. Lozada is a native of Lima, Peru, and a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Winners

Prize Winner in Criticism in 2018:

Jerry Saltz of New York Magazine

For a robust body of work that conveyed a canny and often daring perspective on visual art in America, encompassing the personal, the political, the pure and the profane. Criticism

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Criticism in 2018:

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times

For writing, both downbeat and uplifting, that demonstrated the critic’s sustained dedication to exposing male dominance in Hollywood and decrying the exploitation of women in the film business.

The Jury

Alana Newhouse(Chair)

Editor-in-Chief

Lorraine Branham

Dean and Professor, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications

Michael I. Days

Vice President and Editor for Reader Engagement

Michael Schaffer

Editor

Jay Stowe

former Editor-in-Chief

Winners in Criticism

Hilton Als

For bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context, particularly the shifting landscape of gender, sexuality and race.

Emily Nussbaum

For television reviews written with an affection that never blunts the shrewdness of her analysis or the easy authority of her writing.

Mary McNamara

For savvy criticism that uses shrewdness, humor and an insider's view to show how both subtle and seismic shifts in the cultural landscape affect television.

Inga Saffron

For her criticism of architecture that blends expertise, civic passion and sheer readability into arguments that consistently stimulate and surprise.

2018 Prize Winners

Staff of The Washington Post

For purposeful and relentless reporting that changed the course of a Senate race in Alabama by revealing a candidate’s alleged past sexual harassment of teenage girls and subsequent efforts to undermine the journalism that exposed it.