Acclaimed journalist and writer Linda Kinstler ’13 has secured a prestigious Whiting Award for nonfiction—one of ten prizes recently announced for “exceptional emerging writers.”
Linda Kinstler '13. Image: Pete Kiehart
The awards, each worth $50,000, are given annually to recognize writers of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry.
Kinstler is a contributing writer for The Economist and Jewish Currents, while her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, among other places. Additionally, she is deputy editor at the online culture and politics magazine The Dial.
Her first book, Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends (“a fearlessly brave examination of how history can become distorted over time”), was published in August 2022 and nominated for the 2023 Wingate Award.
“Nimbly reanimating the forgotten or concealed past, Linda Kinstler’s reportage bristles with eagerness, moving like the spy thrillers she tips her hat to,” writes the Whiting Foundation Selection Committee. “She vividly renders the tense maneuvering of agents and assassins and the chilling crimes of the Nazis, but also the quiet heroics of bureaucrats who gumshoe toward justice. Kinstler is crafting a fresh and tautly controlled genre in which familial accountability meets historical reckoning.”
At Bowdoin, Kinstler majored in English and, as a student journalist, was editor-in-chief of The Bowdoin Orient. She went on to study in the UK under a prestigious Marshall Scholarship and is currently a PhD candidate in rhetoric at UC Berkeley.
