Three authors have been named the inaugural winners of the J. Anthony Lukas '55 Prize, an award recognizing superb nonfiction writing in the name of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

Administered by Harvard's Nieman Foundation and the Columbia University School of Journalism, the project recognized Kevin A. Coyne for his work-in-progress, and Adam Hochschild '63 and Henry Mayer for completed books on Monday.

The program commended "the literary grace, the commitment to serious research and the social concern" of the authors, elements that characterized Lukas' works, according to a press release.

Coyne is the winner of the $45,000 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, while Hochschild and Mayer receive the Mark Lynton History Prize and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, respectively. Both prizes come with a $10,000 award.

The three awards will be presented on May 1 at the first annual Conference on Nonfiction Writing and Awards Ceremony at Columbia.

"I'm delighted to be honored with this award," said Hochschild, who spent three years researching and writing his book King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, published by Houghton Miffin in the fall of 1998.

Hochschild has worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones magazine and the anti-war monthly Ramparts.

The Bay Area, Calif. resident said he has primarily focused on writing books since 1981.

He is also the author of Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin.

Mayer, also a Bay Area resident, has likewise prioritized writing his book in recent years.

"This has been my work for the past decade," said Mayer, describing his work on All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, a biography published last fall by St. Martin's Press.

Mayer said he found inspiration for his book, which recounts Garrison's critical role in the abolition of slavery, from two different sources.

Mayer said his experience in writing Son of Thunder: Patrick Henry and the American Republic piqued his interest in slavery and constitutional slavery.

He described Garrison, who started the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator in 1831, as a "wonderful example of a journalistic agitator."

When Mayer began his work on the book in 1989, he found only portraits of Garrison as a fanatic. In the course of his research, though, Mayer found Garrison to be a "much nicer" person, he said.