Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author and military historian Rick Atkinson is coming to Tulsa in December to receive the Tulsa Library Trust’s 2015 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award.
The public can meet Atkinson at a free presentation and book signing at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, Dec. 5 at Hardesty Regional Library, 8316 E. 93rd St., in Connor’s Cove. He will answer questions from the audience. Copies of his works will be available for purchasing. Atkinson will receive the Distinguished Author Award, which consists of a $40,000 cash prize and an engraved crystal book, at a black-tie dinner in his honor on Saturday, Dec. 5 at Southern Hills Country Club.
Atkinson is best known for his Liberation Trilogy, an epic narrative history of the U.S. military’s role in the liberation of Europe in World War II. He has garnered numerous accolades and prizes for the trilogy, including a Pulitzer Prize for the first volume, “An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943,” in 2003. The New York Times praised the second volume, “The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944,” as a “triumph of narrative history, elegantly written,” while the concluding volume, “The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945,” rose to the top of the New York Times best-sellers list shortly after its release in May 2013.
Atkinson formerly served as a reporter, foreign correspondent and senior editor for 25 years at The Washington Post. His most recent assignments were covering the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq, and writing about roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007.
For more information about Atkinson’s visit to Tulsa or the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, visit http://helmerichaward.org or call 918-549-7323.