John Cornwell wins Wilbur Award 2019
John Cornwell, Fellow Commoner and Director of the Science and Human Dimension Project, has won the Wilbur Award 2019 in the magazine category for his Vanity Fair piece Pope Versus Pope.
Awarded annually by the New York based Religion Communicators Council, winners are selected from the top 15 national and metro magazines in the US and Canada which include secular coverage of religious affairs. Mr Cornwell's winning article was on the papacy, the Vatican, and the clerical abuse crisis, published in the December 2018 issue of Vanity Fair (New York) and syndicated globally.
Mr Cornwell is the founder of the Science and Human Dimension Project, which was recently awarded a Templeton grant for research and conferences on AI, and the Rustat Conferences, which are now part of the Intellectual Forum. For some years he was an affiliated research scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, with a special interest in neuroscience.
Mr Cornwell has combined academic interests with journalism across a wide field of politics, science, and religion. In 2004 he won the Science and Medical Network Book of the Year Award for Hitler’s Scientists (Viking Penguin), which arose out of a four day Jesus College conference he convened, culminating with a performance of the play Copenhagen and a talk by its author Michael Frayn. Author of twenty books, he has written regularly for the New Statesman, The Sunday Times, Financial Times, TLS, and has broadcast on BBC’s Hardtalk, Moral Maze, and Beyond Belief. Before returning to Cambridge in 1990 he had worked in many journalistic roles for the Observer, including foreign correspondent in Latin America during the Argentine 'Dirty War', and editor of the foreign news service.
He is currently collaborating with a US production company on a documentary series on the 20th century papacy, and a book on Pope Francis. Mr Cornwell is always happy to talk with students about careers in the media.
