COURTESY
NEWPORT — Richards Free Library and the judges of the Sarah Josepha Hale award are pleased to announce that Nathaniel Philbrick is the 2018 Sarah Josepha Hale Award Medalist. He plans to accept the award at 8 p.m. Oct. 6 at the Newport Opera House.
Born in Boston, Philbrick grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Brown University and received his master’s degree from Duke University. In 1978 he was Brown University’s first Intercollegiate All-American sailor and won the Sunfish North Americans race. After working as an editor at Sailing World magazine, he wrote and edited several books about sailing.
A resident of Nantucket, he is the founding director of the Egan Maritime Institute and a research fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association.
In 1994, he published his first book about the island’s history, “Away Off Shore,” followed by a study of Nantucket’s native legacy titled Abram’s Eyes.
Philbrick published “In the Heart of the Sea” in 2000, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction. In 2003 “Sea of Glory” won the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize and the Albion-Monroe Award from the National Maritime Historical Society. “Mayflower” was a finalist for both the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in History and the Los Angeles Times Book Award and won the Massachusetts Book Award for nonfiction.
His newest book, which is due out in October, is “In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown.”
His writing has also appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe.
For more than years, the Sarah Josepha Hale Award has been given by the Trustees of the Richards Free Library in recognition of a distinguished body of written work in the field of literature and letters. The award honors Hale, an author, poet, and essayist who as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Magazine shaped the opinion of 19th century American women. The list of Hale Award winners includes the finest writers of our times, from Robert Frost in 1956 to Julia Alvarez in 2017.
For more information about the Hale award please contact Andrea Thorpe, director of the Richards Free Library in Newport, at (603) 863-3430 or [email protected].
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