Award Recipients Set for ‘Fall for the Book’ Festival
George Mason University’s Fall for the Book festival, taking place Sept. 19 to 24, has named author and education activist Greg Mortenson as the recipient of the 2010 Mason Award, and author Ann Patchett as the winner of the 2010 Fairfax Prize.
The Mason Award recognizes authors who have made extraordinary contributions to bringing literature to a wide reading public, and the Fairfax Prize recognizes outstanding achievement in the literary arts.
Mortenson’s book “Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time” has sold more than 3.5 million copies in 39 countries.
The book recounts Mortenson’s aborted attempt in 1993 to climb K2, the world’s second highest mountain, and the period he spent being nursed back to health in a small village of Korphe, where he observed children writing in the sand with sticks.
From this experience and that image, Mortenson vowed to start a school in the region. Soon afterward, he co-founded the nonprofit Central Asia Institute, whose mission is “to promote and support community-based education, especially for girls, in remote regions of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
Patchett’s books include the novel “Bel Canto,” which won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize, and the memoir “Truth & Beauty: A Friendship,” named one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle and Entertainment Weekly.
The 12th annual Fall for the Book will feature more than 100 authors at GMU and throughout Northern Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia.
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