SHIPS IN THE DESERT by Jeff Fearnside (Kazakhstan) wins Eric Hoffer Book Award

Jeff Fearnside (Kazakhstan 2002–04)

Ships in the Desert (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2022) has just won the prestigious Eric Hoffer Book Award for Nonfiction—Culture. Full coverage for all the award winners can be found in the US Review of Books, including the Hoffer judges’ commentary here.

Ships also made the Short List for the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize. As noted in their announcement about this, “Less than 5% of the nominees become grand prize award finalists. This small list or ‘short list’ of finalists is an honored distinction of its own”.

Additionally, Ships is currently a finalist for a Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Award for Adult Nonfiction—Essays. The winner of that award will be announced on June 15, 2023.

Ships was also selected one of the five finalists for an Eyelands International Book Award in the category of Published Memoir.

Pulitzer Prize Finalist Kim Barnes has called the book “informative, impassioned, and urgent,” and Peace Corps Worldwide 2022 Writer of the Year Tom Bissell (Uzbekistan 1996) has described as “an intimate and effortlessly wide-ranging account, Ships in the Desert explores universal issues of cultural intolerance, religious bigotry, and how a battle over water rights and the unnatural disaster of the Aral Sea in Central Asia impacts the entire world.

Ships In The Desert
by Jeff Fearnside (Kazakhstan 2002–04)
Santa Fe Writer’s Project
136 pages
August, 2022
$14.95 (paperback), $8.99 (Kindle)