Jane Ferguson’s No Ordinary Assignment: A Memoir (Mariner/HarperCollins) will be awarded this year’s Ann M. Sperber Book Prize by Fordham University. Ferguson will accept the award and deliver remarks at a ceremony Nov. 11 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.
“This memoir stands out for a particularly gripping kind of sentience in the storytelling,” said Amy Aronson, professor of communication and media studies and director of the Sperber Prize. “Ferguson knows how and when to report the cruel, jagged facts of conflict and when to insert herself into the experience of confronting them, humanizing the stakes, bringing us in.”
The prize honors the late Ann M. Sperber, who wrote Murrow: His Life and Times, the critically acclaimed biography of journalist Edward R. Murrow. One edition of that work was published by Fordham University Press. The $1,000 award was established through the generous support of Ann’s mother Lisette Sperber to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on journalism and media. Fordham University’s Department of Communication and Media Studies has presented the award annually since 1999.
Jane Ferguson is an international correspondent for PBS Newshour and a contributor to The New Yorker who has reported from nearly every war front and humanitarian crisis of our time. As a journalist, she lived in Beirut and other cities in the Middle East for 14 years, reporting from the heart of conflicts in Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Sudan, and Gaza. She reported from Yemen as protests grew into civil war during the Arab Spring. She was smuggled into rebel-held Syria as revolution became all-out war, traveling alone to film and document the Assad regime’s crackdown on its own people.
Ferguson traveled to South Sudan in 2017 to cover the complicated conflict and humanitarian disaster engulfing the country, reporting on the widespread famine and horrific war crimes that were causing droves of people to flee. When the Taliban claimed Kabul, Afghanistan in 2021, she was one of the last Western journalists to remain at the airport to cover the United States’ withdrawal from the country.
As a Protestant who grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles in the 1980s and 1990s, Ferguson is no stranger to sectarian violence. Journalism became a calling that could provide a small measure of justice. She previously received the prestigious George Polk Award, an Emmy Award, and an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Award.
Ferguson joins a storied list of previous Sperber Prize winners, including Robert Caro, Charles M. Blow, and Seymour M. Hersh.
The award ceremony is Nov. 11 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center Campus at 6:00 p.m. It is free and open to the public.
