The Marfield Prize
WINNER ANNOUNCED FOR
FOR $10,000 MARFIELD PRIZE
2021 National Award for Arts Writing
The Arts Club of Washington
is honored to announced the winner of the
16th Marfield Prize
for outstanding writing about the arts in 2021 to
Kira Thurman
AUTHOR OF
“Singing Like Germans:
Black Musicians
in the Land of Bach,
Beethoven, and Brahms”
MS. THURMAN WILL RECEIVE $10,000
AS THE MARFIELD AWARD WINNER FOR 2021.
For more information, please visit
Complete list of past recipients of the award are:
- Maggie Doherty for The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s (Knopf: 2021).
- Andrew McConnell Stott for What Blest Genius: The Jubilee That Made Shakespeare (W. W. Norton & Company: 2019)
- Susan Orlean for The Library Book (Simon & Schuster: 2018)
- Wendy Lesser for “You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2017)
- Rachel Corbett for You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin (W. W. Norton & Company: 2016)
- Michael Riedel for Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway (Simon & Schuster: 2015)
- Philip Gefter for Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe (Liveright: 2014)
- Sherill Tippins for Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York’s Legendary Chelsea Hotel (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 2013)
- Anne-Marie O’Connor for The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (Knopf: 2012)
- Yael Tamar Lewin for Night’s Dancer: The Life of Janet Collins (Wesleyan University Press: 2011)
- R. Tripp Evans for Grant Wood: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf: 2010)
- Linda Gordon for Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (W. W. Norton & Company: 2009)
- Brenda Wineapple for White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Anchor: 2008)
- Michael Sragow for Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Pantheon: 2008)
- Jenny Uglow for Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2007)
- Scott Reynolds Nelson for Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry — The Untold Story of an American Legend (Oxford University Press: 2006)
