The 18th Marfield Prize Finalists

Congratulations to the Marfield Prize Finalists

Thank you to all the Marfield Readers who provided wonderful insights to all the books submitted this year.

(in alphabetical order by author’s last name)

A Life of One's Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again by Joanna Biggs (Harper Collins)

All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley (Simon and Schuster)

Times Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance by Jeremy Eichler (Penguin Randomhouse)

Charlie Chaplin vs. America by Scott Eyman (Simon and Schuster)

The Art of Colour: The History of Art in 39 Pigments by Kelly Grovier (Yale)

Joanna Biggs is a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine and the author of A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again. She has written for the London Review of Books, where she worked for fifteen years, as well as the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, Harper’s, the Nation, the New Republic, Bookforum, the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Observer and the Sunday Times. She was a recipient of a grant from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation in 2020, and chosen to be part of the first cohort of the Willa Cather Residency for Writers in Red Cloud, NE. Her first book, All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work, came out in 2015 with Serpent’s Tail in the U.K. In 2017, she co-founded Silver Press to publish feminist writers, including Audre Lorde, Leonora Carrington, Nell Dunn, Chantal Akerman and M. NourbeSe Philip. She lives in New York City.

Patrick Bringley worked for ten years as a guard in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Prior to that, he worked in the editorial events office at The New Yorker magazine. He lives with his wife and children in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. All the Beauty in the World is his first book.

An award-winning critic and cultural historian, Jeremy Eichler currently serves as the chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe. He is the recipient of an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for writing published in The New Yorker, a fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a Public Scholars grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Formerly a critic for The New York Times and a contributor to many other national publications, he holds a Ph.D. in modern European history from Columbia University. For more information, please visit timesecho.com.

Scott Eyman was formerly the literary critic at The Palm Beach Post and is the author or coauthor of sixteen books, including the bestseller John Wayne and Pieces of My Heart and You Must Remember This with actor Robert Wagner. Eyman also writes book reviews for The Wall Street Journal, and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. He and his wife, Lynn, live in West Palm Beach.

Kelly Grovier is the author of five books on visual culture, including A New Way of Seeing: The History of Art in 57 Works and Art Since 1989 (World of Art series) and four collections of poetry, most recently Endangered Sky, with drawings by Sean Scully, published last year. Kelly was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was educated at UCLA and Oxford University, where he earned his doctorate in English literature. He is co-founder of the scholarly journal European Romantic Review.