Book Fest gives Pete Hamill its ‘BoBi’ award
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 honored at City Point in Downtown Brooklyn as part of the Brooklyn Book Festival Gala Mingle on Saturday, Sept. 22. He 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.”