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Elkins Awarded Non-Fiction Pulitzer
Cambridge, Mass. - April 17, 2006 - Caroline Elkins, Hugo K. Foster Associate Professor of African Studies at Harvard, has been awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The award was for her groundbreaking book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt).
"I congratulate Professor Elkins on this extraordinary honor. History can be grueling to reconstruct, even without the hindrance of institutional secrecy; and even the most well-documented findings can fail to regain life when translated to the page. Professor Elkins has researched the Kikiyu detentions with rigor, perseverance, and courage; and she has told this story in ways that few will ever forget," said William C. Kirby, Edith and Benjamin Geisinger Professor of History and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
In her compelling work, Elkins uncovers the dirty secrets of devastating British rule of Kenya from 1952 to 1960 during which time they "detained and brutalized hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu-the colony's largest ethnic group-who had demanded their independence." Despite the fact that the British ordered all records of their brutal occupation destroyed, through her tenacious research, including interviews with hundreds who survived the detention camps, Elkins uncovered what the British tried to keep secret. (book jacket text)
Elkins wrote the manuscript for Imperial Reckoning while a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2003-2004. "[Radcliffe] offered me the space I needed to think and write and a cohort of people who were simply exceptional," she said. "When I came to an impasse in the writing or analysis, I had a group of the world's foremost thinkers sitting right around me who could provide great feedback."
Elkins, a member of the History Department in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, has done extensive research on modern Africa, including human rights and British colonial violence. Her current work, according to her web site, includes "examining the effects of violence and amnesia on local communities and nation-building in post-independent Kenya; and analyzing British counter-insurgency operations after the Second World War."
Even though she has written extensively about colonial Africa, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya is Elkins's first book.
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