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Inaugural winners announced for Silvers-Dudley writing award

NEW YORK (AP) — Staff writers for The New York Times and The New Yorker, an art expert based in Rome and an associate professor at Oxford University are among the nine inaugural winners of the Silvers-Dudley Prizes for criticism and journalism.

NEW YORK (AP) — Staff writers for The New York Times and The New Yorker, an art expert based in Rome and an associate professor at Oxford University are among the nine inaugural winners of the Silvers-Dudley Prizes for criticism and journalism.

The awards are named for the late Robert Silvers, the longtime editor of the New York Review of Books, and for his partner, the late Lady Grace Dudley. Prize money totals $135,000 for the honors, announced Wednesday by the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, with individual awards ranging from $10,000 to $30,000.

“These prizes richly reward a kind of writing that has long been under-recognized in the economy of literary prize-giving — long-form criticism, the intellectual essay, and arts writing — along with the penetrating journalism that Bob nurtured at the New York Review," the author and foundation director Daniel Mendelsohn said in a statement.

Three winners were named in each of three categories: literary criticism, arts writing and journalism.

The recipients for the criticism prize were Los Angeles-based writer Elaine Blair, Oxford associate professor Merve Emre and the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Becca Rothfeld.

Arts writing winners were New Yorker theater critic Vinson Cunningham, New York Times critic Jason Farago and Rome-based Renaissance art critic Ingrid Rowland.

For journalism, the winners were Mexican-based writer Alma Guillermoprieto, London-based columnist Nesrine Malik and Berlin-based writer Thomas Meaney.

The Associated Press