The Cambridge, Harvard, and Princeton university presses and Simon & Schuster published the 2024 PROSE Excellence Awards.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson

AAP Announces PROSE’s Four Category Winners

Earlier this month, we had the announcement of the many category winners of the annual PROSE Awards from the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

Today (February 23), the program has announced its top four “excellence” awards and the one among those four chosen for the top honor, the RR Hawkins.

These honors for “professional and scholarly excellence”—the source of the acronym PROSE—are now in their 47th iteration, and have gone through 105 category finalists and at least 40 category wins to arrive at these four honorees in academic publishing and the Hawkins Award laureate.

A jury of 25 people started with a pool of 540 titles to reach these decisions on what they deem to be books that ” illustrate the extraordinary quality of scholarly publishing and contribute novel ideas to their respective areas of study.”

The 2023 RR Hawkins Award Winner

• Business, Finance, and Management: Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets, Kimberly Kay Hoang, Princeton University Press

Nigel Fletcher-Jones, chief juror of the PROSE Awards, says, “Princeton University Press’ Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets combines excellent storytelling, clear prose, and impressive academic research to create a truly compelling and enlightening narrative, making it the clear choice for this year’s RR Hawkins Award.”

And speaking for Princeton University Press, its director, Christie Henry, says, “The Princeton University Press team is perpetually grateful to be a member of the AAP community, publishers who inspire the very best of us, as do authors like Kimberly Hoang and books like Spiderweb Capitalism.

“We’re celebrating this wonderful honor with profound gratitude for the PROSE Awards and judges, the incredible contributions of all of the publishers involved, and the collaborations enjoyed by and entrusted to us.”

The Four 2023 PROSE ‘Excellence’ Category Winners

You’ll recall that the Hawkins honor is drawn from the category winners, so we see Spiderweb Capitalism again:

• Business, Finance, and Management: Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets, Kimberly Kay Hoang, Princeton University Press
• Biological Sciences: The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Simon & Schuster / Scribner
• North American and US History: Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom, Kathryn Olivarius, Harvard University Press
• Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, and Cosmology: Cosmology, Daniel Baumann, Cambridge University Press

Swann: ‘Extraordinary Contributions’

In a prepared comment, the publishers’ association’s chief operating officer, Syreeta Swann, is quoted, saying, “We are delighted to announce that publications from Princeton University Press, [Simon & Schuster’s] Scribner, Harvard University Press, and Cambridge University Press have been chosen as ‘Excellence Award’ winners in honor of their extraordinary contributions, and that Princeton University Press has been singled out for the season’s top-most honor, the RR Hawkins Awards

“We’re grateful to the PROSE judges, who have worked tirelessly to identify the very best publications of the year, we thank all those who entered, and we congratulate our honorees.”

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More from Publishing Perspectives on the Association of American Publishers is here, more on digital publishing is here, more on scholarly and academic publishing is here, and more on publishing and book awards is here.