Professor Jesse Oak Taylor's The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016) has won the 2017 Ecocriticism Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE).
The judges were Nicole Seymour, winner of the the winner of the ASLE Ecocritical Book Award in 2015; Tom Lynch, founding coordinator of the ASLE Book Awards and editor of the journal Western American Literature; and Molly Westling, Professor Emerita at the University of Oregon.
They describe The Sky of Our Manufacture as “a richly layered analysis of the atmosphere of toxicity beginning in nineteenth century England and shadowing our own contemporary world" that is "elegantly written, admirably focused, and highly original." They praise, too, Taylor's "grasp of environmental history [and] material and economic theory," which enable him to undertake truly "illuminating textual readings."