Finalist: The Boston Globe, by Sarah Schweitzer
For her masterful narrative of one scientist's mission to save a rare whale, a beautiful story fortified by expansive reporting, a quiet lyricism and disciplined use of multimedia.
Nominated Work
October 25, 2014
Biography
Sarah Schweitzer has been a reporter for The Boston Globe for 13 years.
Winners
Prize Winner in Feature Writing in 2015:
Diana Marcum
For her dispatches from California's Central Valley offering nuanced portraits of lives affected by the state's drought, bringing an original and empathic perspective to the story.
Feature Writing
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in Feature Writing in 2015:
Jennifer Gonnerman
For a taut, spare, devastating re-creation of the three-year imprisonment of a young man at Rikers Island, much of it spent in solitary confinement, after he was arrested for stealing a backpack.
The Jury
The Jury
Ann Marie Lipinski(Chair)*
curator
David Finkel*
national enterprise editor
Susan Gage
director of local content
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
author
Mary Rajkumar
international enterprise editor
Barry Siegel*
professor of English and director, literary journalism program
Julia Turner
editor-in-chief
Winners in Feature Writing
No award
No award
John Branch
For his evocative narrative about skiers killed in an avalanche and the science that explains such disasters, a project enhanced by its deft integration of multimedia elements.
Eli Sanders
For his haunting story of a woman who survived a brutal attack that took the life of her partner, using the woman's brave courtroom testimony and the details of the crime to construct a moving narrative.
Amy Ellis Nutt
For her deeply probing story of the mysterious sinking of a commercial fishing boat in the Atlantic Ocean that drowned six men.
2015 Prize Winners
Anthony Doerr
An imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.
Julia Wolfe
A powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century.
Stephen Adly Guirgis
A nuanced, beautifully written play about a retired police officer faced with eviction that uses dark comedy to confront questions of life and death.
David I. Kertzer
An engrossing dual biography that uses recently opened Vatican archives to shed light on two men who exercised nearly absolute power over their realms.