BALAKIAN’S THE BURNING TIGRIS WINS RAPHAEL LEMKIN PRIZE
Noyan Tapan News Agency, Armenia
Sept 27 2005
LOS ANGELES, SEPTEMBER 27, NOYAN TAPAN – ARMENIANS TODAY. Peter
Balakian’s The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s
Response has been awarded the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize for best
scholarly book in the preceding two years on the subject of genocide,
mass killings, gross human rights violations, and the prevention of
such crimes, Asbarez Online reported.
The award is given by the Institute for the Study of Genocide at
John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY Graduate Center in New
York City. The prize, which comes with a cash award, commemorates
Raphael Lemkin, the legal scholar who pioneered the international
legal concept of genocide. Helen Fein, chair of the prize committee,
called The Burning Tigris “a book of enduring scholarly value and of
important contemporary meaning.” Previous winners include Samantha
Power’s A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (winner
of the Pulitzer Prize), and Alison Des Forges’s Leave None To Tell
The Story: Genocide In Rwanda.
The Burning Tigris was a New York Times bestseller and a Times notable
book of 2003. Balakian is the author of seven other books, including
Black Dog of Fate, which won the 1998 PEN/Albrand Prize for memoir,
and June-tree: New and Selected Poems.