Nathaniel Philbrick to Accept the 2018 Sarah Hale Award

Nathaniel Philbrick

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 will accept the award on October 6, 2018 at 8:00 p.m. at the Newport Opera House.

Born in Boston, Nathaniel 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 over fifty 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 author, poet, and essayist Sarah Josepha Hale, who as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Magazine shaped the opinion of nineteenth 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, Newport, NH at 603-863-3430 or rfl@newport.lib.nh.us.