Jane Mayer - Awards and Honors

Awards and Honors

Mayer was awarded the 2008 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism for her investigative reporter leading to her book The Dark Side. The Award, presented annually by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, is given to reporters for "distinguished cumulative accomplishments." In presenting the award, Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Journalism school and one of the nine members of the award committee, noted that Mayer and her fellow winner, Andrew C. Revkin, science reporter for The New York Times, "set the gold standard for journalists, and we have benefitted tremendously from their dedication and hard work." She has also won the Ridenhour Book Prize and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.

Mayer was a finalist in the National Magazine Awards for 2007 for her nonfiction piece in The New Yorker entitled The Black Sites, which was subsequently collected in The Best American Magazine Writing 2008, published by Columbia University Press and edited by Jacob Weisberg, then editor-in-chief of Slate.

In 2008, Mayer was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in connection with her ongoing work on her third book, The Dark Side. In 2009 Mayer was awarded the Hillman Prize and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for The Dark Side.