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Anand Giridharadas To Receive Rushdie Award

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Updated: Feb 9, 2021

The Humanist Hub and the Humanist Community at Harvard, along with the Harvard College Community of Humanists, Atheists, and Agnostics (HCHAA) and the American Humanist Association, are thrilled to announce that Anand Giridharadas is the 13th annual winner of our Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture: the ‘Rushdie Award,’ after first winner Sir Salman Rushdie.

Giridharadas was selected for his extraordinary accomplishments as a writer, at a very young age; and most recently for his groundbreaking public advocacy for humanist ideals such as justice, equity, compassion, and intersectionality. Among many accomplishments, he is the author of three books; a prolific columnist, correspondent, and contributor to publications such as the New York Times, where he first interned and wrote articles at the age of 17, and at the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and others; an on-air political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC; and a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.

Giridharadas’s most recent book, “Winners Take All,” is a bold and brilliant examination of the increasing concentration of wealth and influence among a new global aristocracy. In the book, and in a vigorous campaign across traditional and social media, he argues that America in particular has become a “functional oligarchy.” But for Giridharadas, wealthy and influential people have come to dominate not only the world’s financial resources, but also to hoard an outsized and unhealthy share of human dignity. With passion and precision, he shows how billionaires, corporations, consulting firms, and other elites have used philanthropy and other charitable endeavors to exert influence while diverting attention from the need for more comprehensive social and economic justice reform.

We are particularly proud to announce, therefore, that Giridharadas will accept our 2019 award as part of delivering the opening keynote for this year’s 20th annual Social Enterprise Conference, a joint production of students at the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, set to bring together approximately 1000 top leaders, practitioners and students on March 2-3, 2019 to engage in dialogue, debate, and expression around Social Enterprise. Much of this year’s conference will effectively be an opportunity to respond to Giridharadas’s call for self-examination and change by precisely the sort of leaders that can often be found at HBS and HKS (and, perhaps, at some humanist gatherings!). We look forward to this year’s celebration as a special opportunity for open and critical dialogue.

For more information and an opportunity to purchase tickets for this event as part of the Social Enterprise Conference, see: http://socialenterpriseconference.org. A limited number of tickets have been set aside for humanist students at Harvard or MIT: please contact info@harvardhumanist.org.

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