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Michael Gawenda’s book My Life as a Jew has won the Leslie and Sophie Caplan Award for Jewish Nonfiction at the 2024 Shalom Australian Jewish Book Awards.

On receiving the award, Michael said, ‘It was a great honour to win this award, the most meaningful award I have received in a long life of writing. I am deeply grateful to the judges and the Caplan family. At a time like this, to have awards like this supporting Jewish writers is just so important.' 

The judges praised the book as a ‘bold, fearless, unapologetic, deeply personal and deeply intelligent exploration of Jewishness, of what it is like to be a Jew in today’s world of rampant antisemitism’. They went on comment that:

‘Gawenda uses his personal experiences as a lens to trace the roots of the current explosion of antisemitic sentiments and, while doing so, he manages also to go outside of the particularities of Jewish experiences, engaging with universal questions of identity, belonging, the ethics of journalism and politics, the nature of evil and complicity. In the age of disinformation and instant opinions, it is precious to have this book whose author does not believe in euphemisms nor platitudes nor any other pseudointellectual shortcuts. Gawenda's considered tone, backed by a lifetime of research experience and natural curiosity, his humility and his writerly possession of what Hemingway so aptly called ‘a built-in, shockproof, shit detector’ all make Gawenda's writing feel like a breath of fresh air in the contemporary literary landscape.’

Scribe congratulates Michael on this achievement.