Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka Wins Anisfield-Wolf Book Award

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On Monday, award sponsor the Cleveland Foundation announced the winners of the 78th Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. The recipients are the following:

* Laird Hunt, Kind One, Fiction

* Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds, Fiction

* Eugene Gloria, My Favorite Warlord, Poetry

* Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree, Nonfiction

* Wole Soyinka, Lifetime Achievement 

Past winners include five writers who went on to win Nobel Prizes: Nadine Gordimer, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott and Nigerian author Wole Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize in literature three years after winning the Anisfield-Wolf Award for his memoir, Ake: The Years of Childhood.

"The 2013 Anisfield-Wolf winners are exemplars who broaden our vision of race and diversity," said The Root Editor-in-Chief Henry Louis Gates Jr., who chairs the jury. "This year, there is exceptional writing about the war in Iraq, slavery on a Kentucky pig farm, the Filipino experience in the U.S. and the complexity of families in which a child is radically different from parents."

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Learn more at Anisfield-Wolf.