Awards & Prizes

The Goldsmith Book Prize

About the award

The Goldsmith Book Prize is awarded to the trade and academic book published in the United States in the last 24 months that best fulfills the objective of improving democratic governance through an examination of the intersection between the media, politics and public policy. Recent Goldsmith Book Prizes have been awarded to books about political journalism, the history of news, news and political polarization, internet freedom, local news and digital democracy. Books that are not on the topic of media and politics will not be considered.

Financial support for the Goldsmith Awards Program is provided by an annual grant from the Goldsmith Fund of the Greenfield Foundation. The program is administered by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Rules and Information

Submissions

Submissions for the 2023 Goldsmith Book Prize have now closed. The deadline to submit was December 16, 2022, 11:59pm ET. Entries for the 2023 Goldsmith Book Prize must have been published between January 1, 2021, and December 31, 2022. Books outside the defined category are not eligible for an award and will not be reviewed by the award committee. All submissions must be in English. Edited volumes will not be accepted.

Prize Money

$5,000 is awarded to the winner in each category.

Submission Info

Submissions for the 2023 Goldsmith Book Prize have closed. Check back in the fall to submit a book for the 2024 prize.

Questions

Please contact Lindsay Underwood at the Shorenstein Center: lindsayunderwood@hks.harvard.edu

2022 Winners

Winner, Goldsmith Book Prize: Trade

You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War

Elizabeth Becker

From the publisher (Public Affairs):

Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade.

View the story

Winner, Goldsmith Book Prize: Academic

Choosing the Future: Technology and Opportunity in Communities

Karen Mossberger, Caroline J. Tolbert, and Scott J. LaCombe

From the Publisher (Oxford University Press)

Digital information drives participation in politics, the economy, and society. Yet great disparities exist as to which communities have access to the internet. In 2017, only half of residents of formerly industrial Flint, Michigan, had broadband or satellite internet at home, while over 90 percent of those in thriving Sunnyvale, California, in Silicon Valley, were connected.

View the story

View all winners

Recent Announcements

February 23, 2023

Announcing the 2023 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting Finalists

The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School is proud to announce the six finalists for the 2023 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. The Goldsmith Prize, first awarded in 1993 and funded by a gift from the Greenfield Foundation, honors the best public service investigative journalism that has made an impact on local, state, or federal public policy or the practice of politics in the United States.

February 27, 2023

Semi Finalists for 2023 Goldsmith Prize

This year nearly 150 examples of investigative reporting were nominated for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative reporting. The following 24 semi-finalists were among the top 30 entries that this year’s judges read. While they were not selected as one of the six finalists for the prize, the judges deemed that they were of extremely high quality and fit the Prize’s criteria for impact on US public policy, and so are worthy of public recognition.