Finalists Announced for $100,000 Jewish Literature Prize

-- Publishers Weekly, 1/29/2009 10:48:00 AM

The five fiction finalists for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature is: Elisa Albert for The Book of Dahlia (Free Press); Sana Krasikov for One More Year (Spiegel & Grau); Anne Landsman for The Rowing Lesson (Soho Press); Dalia Sofer for The Septembers of Shiraz (Ecco); and Anya Ulinich for Petropolis (Viking Penguin). The winner will receive a $100,000 prize—the largest prize in the Jewish literary award; a $25,000 Choice Award will also be awarded to a second book. In 2006, in celebration of businessman/philanthropist Sami Rohr’s 80th birthday, his children and grandchildren inaugurated the Sami Rohr Prize to honor his lifelong love of Jewish literature. The prize is administered by The Jewish book Council under the direction of Geri Gindea.

The Prize considers fiction and nonfiction in alternating years, honoring an emerging author in the field of Jewish literature who has written a book of exceptional literary merit that stimulates an interest in themes of Jewish concern. Previous winners of the Sami Rohr Prize are Lucette Lagnado in 2008 for her nonfiction work The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (Ecco) and Tamar Yellin in 2007 for her novel, The Genizah at the House of Shepher (Toby Press).