Ruth Franklin Wins National Book Critics Circle Award
Biographer and critic Ruth Franklin Image by Alan Chin
By Talya Zax March 17, 2017
On Thursday, Ruth Franklin took home the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Franklin was honored for her biography of the writer Shirley Jackson “Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life.”
Franklin, a book critic whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review Of Books, and Harpers, among other outlets, is a former editor at The New Republic. Her book “A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction” was a finalist for the Jewish Book Council’s Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature in 2012.
Jackson, who gained attention for her horror-tinged short stories, most famously “The Lottery,” would have been 100 last year. (She passed away in 1965.) In October, the Forward’s Benjamin Ivry spoke with Franklin about Jackson’s life and work.
“Jackson didn’t identify as a Jew exactly but as someone with a very strong Jewish connection, which many of her readers might not have suspected,” Franklin said.
Other winners at the Awards included Margaret Atwood, who took home the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, novelist Louise Erdrich, poet Ishion Hutchinson, critic Carol Anderson, memoirist Hope Jahren, novelist Yaa Gyaasi, who won the John Leonard Award for achievement in an author’s first book, and book critic Michelle Dean, who received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
