Souvenir title wins Anthony Lukas Book Prize

Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War (Souvenir Press) by Susan Southard has been awarded the 2016 Anthony Lukas Book Prize, which "recognises the best in American non-fiction writing".

The $10,000 (nearly £7,000) prize is administered by the Columbia University School of Journalism and Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

Nagasaki is built around "raw, emotive" eye-witness accounts which reconstruct the days, months and years after the bombing of Nagasaki, and the "enduring impact of life as the only people in history who have lived through a nuclear attack and its aftermath". Southard spent a decade interviewing, and researching the lives of the "hibakusha" (the Japanese word for atomic bomb-affected people).

The judges said: "With lean and powerful prose she describes the indescribable taking the reader almost minute by minute through the bombing of Nagasaki and then the aftermath… Without diatribes or polemics she leaves the reader with a resolve that such a thing must never happen again.”

Nagasaki was published by Souvenir Press last November.