Awards for nonfiction

WINNER

Factory Girls: From Village To City In  A Changing China by Leslie T. Chang

Factory Girls is a wonderful work of reportage about a world that seems to be changing almost faster than it can be described: industrial China, where young women from rural hometowns come to work in the factories of Dongguang. It is also an everyday world, as it must be to anyone who lives in it. Sympathetic but not sentimental, Leslie T. Chang immersed herself in this complex place and in the contradictory lives of her subjects without forgetting her crucial role apart, as an observer whose own choices and history mark her as considerably different from the women she describes. In the book, the “factory girls” speak in their own voices, and the author does an extraordinary job of explaining what those voices are saying, in what context they speak, without ever taking over those voices or overwriting them with her own. These women are an important part of the new China we in the West struggle to understand. Chang writes, “The details of their lives might be grim and mundane, yet these young women told me their stories as if they mattered.” With this book, she has proved that they do.

FINALISTS

Muslims of The Metropolis: The Stories of Three Immigrant Families in the West by Kavitha Rajagopalan

Muslims of Metropolis is a ground-breaking endeavor that tells the story of modern followers of Islam from inside their homes, workplaces and mosques. Kavitha Rajagopalan contextualizes their stories with healthy doses of history, sociology and political science. She goes deep and broad, providing a snapshot of a people who live across the world but remain largely unknown and misunderstood.







The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang

This vital memoir writes the story of a generation of Hmong nearly obliterated by war. Kao began her memoir as a series of love letters to her late grandmother, but she transformed The Latehomecomer into a profound story of what remains after death and upheaval. The Latehomecomer surges, propelled by the desire to do justice to those she describes. This memoir moves beyond mere document. The book is a singular tribute to a remarkable woman and an eloquent, firsthand account of a people who have worked hard to make their voices heard.