Book News: Jenny Uglow Wins National Award for Arts Writing
Michael Rogers -- Library Journal, 05/15/2008
- Takes prize for Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick
- Unanimous choice of judges Robert Pinsky, Jamaica Kincaid, and Nancy Pearl
The Arts Club of Washington has selected Jenny Uglow as winner of the second annual National Award for Arts Writing for her title Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick (Farrar). To help increase access to 
the arts, “the $15,000 prize is given in recognition of excellence in writing about the arts for a broad audience, and celebrates prose that is lucid, luminous, clear, and inspiring,” the group said. Uglow chronicles Bewick’s life and achievements, the crown being the first field guide to birds for ordinary people illustrated with accurate and beautiful woodcuts. According to the Arts Club, “These woodcuts, in turn, influenced book illustration for the next century.”
The book was the unanimous choice of the judges: former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, award-winning novelist Jamaica Kincaid, and librarian Nancy Pearl, who said that “Uglow’s plain, richly elegant sentences present a career that, fascinating in itself, becomes a way of thinking about all art: the tools, the materials, the personality and the surroundings, all interacting with the artist’s craving to make a new reality.”
