Books

Pritzker Prize Goes to a Fiction Writer for First Time

by Claire Luchette

On Tuesday, novelist Tim O'Brien was named the winner of the 2013 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. The announcement is big for the fiction community: O'Brien is the first novelist to receive the nod. The six previous winners have included historians and military researchers.

Your Pritzker-winner primer: the father of the modern war narrative, Tim O'Brien is best known for the haunting and poignant novels The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato, which won the 1979 National Book Award. His novels and short stories are largely based on his own experiences in Vietnam.

The Pritzker Library, based in Chicago, will present the prize of $100,000 to O'Brien in November. Kudos, sir! A nice sum for an even nicer accomplishment, which will hopefully open up the door for more fiction writers to score the honor in the future.