2009 Book Award Winners
The Phi Beta Kappa Book Awards are given each year in December for outstanding scholarly works published in the United States. The winning books, drawn from the fields of humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics, must be of broad interest and accessible to the general reader.
These awards support the general mission of the Society to advocate for excellence in the liberal arts and sciences and to promote dialogue about important issues and ideas of our time in an environment of intellectual fellowship.
This year’s award recipients are Peter Trachtenberg, Christopher Benfey and Harold Varmus. The Society presented the awards on Friday, December 4, at The Metropolitan Club of Washington, D.C. Members of the Secretary's Circle and the Fellows joined the Phi Beta Kappa Senate at this event.
André Bernard, vice president and secretary of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, was the keynote speaker at the 2009 awards ceremony.
To see more videos about this year's book awards, go to our YouTube channel.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON AWARD — $10,000 Prize
Peter Trachtenberg received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning (Little, Brown and Company, 2008). This award was established in 1960 for significant contributions to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.
Trachtenberg's essays and short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, TriQuarterly, Bomb, the Jewish Forward and Chicago, and have been broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered. He received the Nelson Algren Award for Short Fiction and the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award for Fiction from the City College of New York. He has taught at Brown University, The New School, Johns Hopkins, NYU, the School of Visual Arts and City College of New York. In 2008-2009, he was an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York with his wife, Mary Gaitskill. PRESS RELEASE & VIDEO
Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke, Benfey has emerged over the past decade as a prolific critic, essayist and author, whose reviews in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement have established him as a distinguished contemporary arbiter of modern and late 20th century American literature. PRESS RELEASE & VIDEO
of Science (W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2009). This award is offered for outstanding contributions by scientists to the literature of science. Its purpose is to encourage literate and scholarly interpretations of the physical and biological sciences and mathematics.
Varmus is president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and former director of the National Institutes of Health. He lives with his wife, Constance Casey, in New York City. They have two sons also living in New York. PRESS RELEASE & VIDEO
Previous ΦBK book award winners have included Marjorie Garber, Harold Bloom, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, Robert Coles, Richard Hofstadter, Jared Diamond, Edward O. Wilson, Ernst Mayr, Stephen Jay Gould and Linus Pauling, among others.
For more about the awards, please contact the Society at (202) 745-3235 or write to awards@pbk.org.