RFK Book Award Winner honored by Austin Public Library Friends Foundation

(2012-08-17) Robert F. Kennedy Book Award winner Douglas Brinkley was recently honored by the Austin Public Library Friends Foundation with the Illumine Award for Non-fiction. The Illumine Awards "honor members of the Austin community for outstanding literary achievement." The award will be presented at a ceremony in November.

Brinkley received the RFK Book Award in 2007 for his book, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

The RFK Award was founded in 1980, with the proceeds from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s best-selling biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times. Each year the RFK Center presents an award to the book which "most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy's purposes - his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity." The RFK Book Award has been recognized as one of the most prestigious honors an author can receive.