Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Robert Satloff

Attention all authors! If you have been toiling away in obscurity, frustrated that a Field Guide to the Birds of the Middle East is in the Amazon top ten of Middle East books instead of your just-published masterpiece, then The Washington Institute has the answer: The Washington Institute Book Prize.

For more than two decades, our Institute has focused not just on producing original policy-relevant research but on helping our nation’s leaders distinguish between the “noise” that emanates from the Middle East and the truly important facts, trends and developments that have an impact on American interests. The avalanche of books that has emerged on Middle East politics and U.S. regional policy in recent years has compelled us to expand our scope. The result is The Washington Institute Book Prize for non-fiction books in English on the Middle East. The purpose of the prize is to identify the most outstanding new works and give them the attention they deserve. To do that, we have established the world’s most lucrative awards in the field of Middle East studies, with a top prize of $30,000 to the gold-medal winner chosen by an independent jury of impeccable scholars. (Win a Pulitzer and you only get $10,000…)

So, contact your publisher. You have until May 1 to enter your book in the competition. Only new books (published since May 1, 2007) are eligible. And if you don’t have a submission for this year’s competition, now is the time to start writing to make our deadline for 2009!