Margaret Atwood and Kathleen Jamie Win 2014 Orion Book Award

Posted on May 8, 2014

Margaret Atwood and Kathleen Jamie are the winners of the 2014 Orion Book Award. The annual award from Orion magazine recognizes books published in North America during the previous calendar year. The award is presented to books "that deepen the reader's connection to the natural world."

Margaret Atwood won in the fiction category for her novel, MaddAddam (Nan A. Talese). Orion editors say: "Margaret Atwood's witty insights into the lay of our cultural and environmental landscape infuse her work with just the right balance of devastation and humor. She has a masterful grasp of how storytelling is intimately tied to resilience, and nowhere is that more evident than in this newest novel."

Sightlines: A Conversation with the Natural World by Kathleen Jamie (The Experiment) won in the nonfiction category. Orion editors say: "Kathleen Jamie's Sightlines dissects the natural world with precision, humor, and love. The essays in this book not only inspire us to look more closely, but also have the power to open us up to a new kind of emotional experience of the planet."

The fiction finalists are All the Land to Hold Us by Rick Bass (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Archipelago by Monique Roffey (Penguin Books) and The Last Animal by Abby Geni (Counterpoint). The nonfiction finalists include Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions), Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman (Little, Brown, and Company) and The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild by Lyanda Lynn Haupt (Little, Brown, and Company). You can out more about the award here.

Photo: Nan A. Talese/The Experiment