Best non-fiction book on international affairs
AWARD YEAR: 2023
AWARD NAME: The Cornelius Ryan Award 2023
RECIPIENT: Paul Caruana Galizia
AFFILIATION: Penguin Random House, Riverhead Books
HONORED WORK: “A Death in Malta”
The author has written an outstanding biography of his mother, Daphne Caruana Galizia – a Maltese journalist assassinated by a car bomb for exposing pervasive government corruption in the island nation. She was 53. In the wake of her murder, Paul became an investigative journalist himself, producing a meticulously reported and highly readable account of his mother’s life. The author details the immense journalistic and legal difficulties she confronted in the face of unrelenting government opposition. He captures her ability to juggle the increasingly dangerous reporting with family life. Finally, he builds upon his mother’s investigative work into Malta’s corruption and joins, along with his two brothers, the hunt for her killers. The three sons also successfully appealed for an international campaign to expose Maltese wrongdoing. Paul Caruana Galizia’s book is a clarion call to journalists and nations to step up when they witness the corruption of democratic institutions, the spread of disinformation and the subversion of the rule of law.
Link to the winning work:
A Death in Malta
Citation for Excellence:
Robert D. Kaplan
Penguin Random House
“The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China”