British historian Sir Max Hastings has won the 2012 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. At the Library’s annual Liberty Gala in October, the historian will receive a $100,000 honorarium.
Hastings has written 23 books, most recently Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 (published as All Hell Let Loose in the United States), Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-45, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-45 and Nemesis: The Battle for Japan 1944-45. The annual prize celebrates “a body of work that has profoundly enriched the public understanding of American military history.”
Pritzker Military Library founder colonel J.N. Pritzker had this statement: “Hastings is a gifted narrative historian who has made a significant contribution to the way we understand military conflict from a global perspective … He has a keen ability for connecting the plans of world leaders with the battlefield actions of individual soldiers. Perhaps most importantly, his accessible style of writing brings the story of the Citizen Soldier to a broad audience and makes him popular amongst scholars and the casual reader.”