The 14th Marfield Prize Finalists
Congratulations to the 14th Marfield Prize Finalists
After passing from one hand to another, a Gutenberg Bible is lost for half a millennia, then found and generously shared in the internet to every eager reader around the world; a lover of music tells the choir of stories about the melodies that filled the American concert halls enriching our culture today; with eloquent and sometimes profound prose, a fiction writer travels to Siena, Italy and ruminates on eight works of art imparting glimpses about the meaning of life and our mortality; a jubilee in a town in England to celebrate the genius of William Shakespeare turns into a disaster but fortunately fails to derail the brilliance of The Bard eternal; and the great and tormented artist and architect Michelangelo constructs a house for God as he wrestles with his own demons doubtful if he is even worthy to enter the abode of Heaven. These are the finalists to the 14th Marfield Prize for books published in 2019. Come celebrate the joy of reading books about the arts.
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)
Rob Kapilow Listening For America: Inside The Great American Songbook from Gershwin to Sondheim
Andrew McConnell Stott What Blest Genius: The Jubilee That Made Shakespeare
Margaret Leslie Davis is the award-winning author of books about the history of the West, a region she calls the “Pastel Empire”; The author’s books have been praised by reviewers in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, NPR and the New York Times.
The author’s most recent book is The Lost Gutenberg: The Astounding Story of One Book’s Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey published by Penguin Random House. In a starred review, Kirkus described the book as “Engrossing reading… A great read for any book lover.” Library Journal called the work, “A gripping account of the importance of books as cultural artifacts and of one particular work that transformed the world.” The New York Times Book Review praised the work as “A lively tale of historical innovation, the thrill of the bibliophile’s hunt, greed and betrayal.”
Davis’ work has been featured on ABC’s Good Morning America and excerpted in Vanity Fair Magazine. The author has appeared on C-Span Book TV, the History Channel “Modern Marvels”; as well as documentaries seen on the Discovery Channel and A&E’s Biography. She is a California lawyer and graduate of Georgetown University. She lives in Los Angeles.
photo by Peter Schaaf
Rob Kapilow has just been named as the new Artist Partner for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra for the next 3 seasons, and he is currently an Artist-in-Residence for the Kaufman Music Center in NYC, the Wilma and Clifford Smith Visitor in Music at the University of Toronto, and Artist-in-Residence at the Thurnauer School of the JCC in New Jersey.
photo by Diana Matar
Hisham Matar’s work has been translated into thirty languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and Associate Professor in English, Comparative Literature, and Asia & Middle East Cultures departments at Barnard College, Columbia University.
Matar’s most recent work, A Month in Siena, is an intimate exploration of grief, art and human intimacy, written in the time after finishing The Return but before its release. Published in late 2019, it has garnered widespread critical acclaim, and was named a book of the year by numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, the New Statesman and the Financial Times.
His memoir, The Return, was published in 2016 and was the recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Award, the Prix du Livre Etranger Inter & Le Journal du Dimanche, the Rathbones Folio Prize, The Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize and Germany’s Geschwister Scholl Prize. It was one of The New York Times' top 10 books of the year.
Born in New York City to Libyan parents, Hisham Matar spent his childhood in Tripoli and Cairo and has lived most of his adult life in London. His debut novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and The Guardian First Book Award, and won numerous international prizes, including the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and a Commonwealth First Book Award. His second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance, was published to great acclaim in 2011.
Andrew McConnell Stott is a writer and academic whose books include The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi (2009); The Poet and The Vampyre: The Curse of Byron and the Story of Literature’s Greatest Monsters (2013); and What Blest Genius? The Jubilee That Made Shakespeare (2019). He lives in Los Angeles.
Dr. William E. Wallace is the Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor of Art History at Washington University in St. Louis, where he has taught since 1983. He earned his B.A. from Dickinson College, his M.A. from the University of Illinois, and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has written more than 80 essays on Renaissance art and four books on Michelangelo, including Michelangelo at San Lorenzo: The Genius as Entrepreneur; Michelangelo: Selected Scholarship in English; and Michelangelo: The Complete Sculpture, Painting, Architecture, which was awarded the 1999 Umhoefer Prize for Achievement in the Humanities. He recently completed a scholarly biography of Michelangelo. Professor Wallace has received numerous awards and fellowships, including stays at the Villa I Tatti (Harvard University's Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence) and the American Academy in Rome. In 1990 Professor Wallace was invited to the Vatican to confer about the conservation of Michelangelo's frescos in the Sistine Chapel. He appeared in a BBC film, The Private Life of a Masterpiece: Michelangelo's David, and served as the principal consultant for the BBC film, The Divine Michelangelo.