Pete Hamill Celebrates Brooklyn Book Festival's Best of Brooklyn, Inc. Award, 9/22-23

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The Brooklyn Book Festival announced today that noted journalist, essayist and author Pete Hamill will receive the Festival's prestigious Best of Brooklyn, Inc.-The "BoBi"-Award, which is bestowed each year on an author who has had a broad impact on the field of literature and whose body of work exemplifies or speaks to the spirit of Brooklyn. Hamill will be celebrated at City Point in Downtown Brooklyn as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival Gala Mingle on Saturday, September 22. Hamill will then be featured at the main Festival on Sunday the 23rd, in conversation with Bill Goldstein (of WNBC-TV's Bill's Books), and joining former BoBi Award winners Edwidge Danticat and Paul Auster for readings moderated by Johnny Temple, chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council.

"For me, this is a great honor, one that humbles me in many, many ways," said Hamill. "Brooklyn is my Old Country, my true home place, the place that shaped me, the place where I learned to read, to listen, to fill myself with visions. The place of music and laughter and decency, punctuated now and then by tragedy. I will carry that Brooklyn with me to my grave."

The eldest son of Irish immigrant parents, Pete Hamill was born in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He left school at age 16 to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and attend night classes at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School with the intent of becoming a comic book artist. After service in the U.S. Navy, he began his career as a journalist, and over the ensuing decades covered both domestic and international wars and conflicts. Hamill is the author of 18 books, including the best-selling A Drinking Life, the novels Snow in August, Tabloid City and Forever, and a collection of short stories, The Christmas Kid, to be released in October. He also served as editor-in-chief of the New York Post and the New York Daily News.

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