Maya Jasanoff
2021 Booker Prize Judge (Chair)
- Prizes judged
Maya Jasanoff is a professor at Harvard, where she holds named chairs in History and in the Arts and Sciences
She is the author of three works of global history—most recently The Dawn Watch (2017), about the life and times of Joseph Conrad—which have won honours including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Cundill Prize, and been shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford and the James Tait Black Prizes. Maya frequently writes about history and literature for publications including The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books.
In 2021 will deliver the Lawrence Stone Lectures at Princeton University comparing the ways in which novelists and historians tell stories. She is currently working on a wide-ranging book about ancestry and inheritance in human history, a topic she grew curious about partly as a consequence of her own mixed Indian and Jewish heritage. A 2013 Guggenheim fellow, in 2017 she was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction literature.