Elie Wiesel Awarded 2012 Chicago Tribune Literary Prize

Posted on August 6, 2012

Elie Wiesel, author of more than 50 books and recipient of the United States Congressional Medal of Honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, has been awarded awarded the 2012 Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for lifetime achievement. Wiesel will receive the award on Sunday, November 11 at Chicago's Symphony Center at 10 a.m. during a Chicago Tribune Printers Row program.

Gerould Kern, editor, Chicago Tribune, says, "We are deeply honored to bestow the Chicago Tribune Literary Award upon Elie Wiesel, a man revered around the world as a living symbol of human rights. Drawing upon his personal experiences as a Holocaust survivor, Mr. Wiesel's words have passionately and powerfully fought injustice and intolerance. He is a champion of the human spirit's capacity to overcome evil."

The Chicago Tribune also announced the winners of the 2012 Heartland Prizes for fiction and nonfiction. Novelist and short story writer Richard Ford was awarded the Heartland Prize for fiction for his novel Canada. The sequel in his Bascombe series, Independence Day, was the first novel awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner award in the same year. Paul Hendrickson was awarded the Heartland Prize for non-fiction for Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961. Hendrickson was a prizewinning feature writer for the Washington Post for 20 years and now teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pennsylvania.