Turku Book Award 2021

The 2021 Turku Book Award—a joint award of the Rachel Carson Center and the European Society for Envrionmental History—goes to Nicolai Hannig (TU Darmstadt) for his monograph Kalkulierte Gefahren. Naturkatastrophen und Vorsorge seit 1800 (Wallstein, 2019).

Congratulations to Nicolai Hannig!

In his book Nicolai Hannig provides a history of human measures against natural disasters. Looking back at the past two centuries, Hannig explores different ways of protecting against socio-environmental disasters and their effects on the transformation of modern society.

Nicolai Hannig’s book was selected from over fifty submissions received this year. At a virtual award ceremony on 9 July 2021 the members of the 2021 Turku Prize Committee presented the 2021 Turku Book Award to Nicolai Hannig.

The shortlisted titles:

Lydia Barnett (Northwestern University): After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe

Thomas Fleischman (Universiy of Rochester): Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany’s Rise and Fall

Thomas Lekan (University of South Carolina): Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti

Luigi Piccioni (Università della Calabria): The Beloved Face of the Country: The First Movement for Nature Conservation Protection in Italy, 1880–1934


Members of the 2021 Turku Prize Committee are:

  • Martin Knoll (Salzburg University, Austria)
  • Christof Mauch (Rachel Carson Center, LMU, Germany) (Chair)
  • Ruth Oldenziel (Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands)
  • Doubravka Olšáková (Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic)
  • Ulrike Plath (Tallinn University, Estonia

Here the call for books for the 2021 Turku Price.