The Hitchens Prize 2019 - George Packer

The Dennis & Victoria Ross Foundation is pleased to announce that George Packer is the winner of The Hitchens Prize for 2019.

In his long, distinguished, and courageous career, Packer has written on subjects as disparate as the Iraq War, African megacities, contemporary American politics, American diplomacy, and the challenges of immigration in Europe. Packer is the author of, among other works, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (2019); the National Book Award–winning The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (2013); and The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (2005), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is also the editor of The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World (2003) and of a two-volume edition of George Orwell’s essays (2009). Packer is currently a staff writer at The Atlantic and was previously, for 15 years, a staff writer at The New Yorker.

The Hitchens Prize, now in its fifth year, is awarded annually to an author or a journalist who, in the spirit of the late Christopher Hitchens, demonstrates a commitment to free expression and to the pursuit of truth without regard to personal or professional consequence. The previous winners of the award are documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney (2015); Washington Post editor Marty Baron (2016); former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter (2017); and writer and activist Masha Gessen (2018).

Dennis Ross, the president and director of the Dennis & Victoria Ross Foundation, said of Packer: “We are very pleased to award George Packer the 2019 Hitchens Prize. Christopher Hitchens’s career set a standard of intellectual seriousness and integrity that continues to inspire and is our benchmark for the prize. George’s work meets that standard in every measure, and offers its own inspiration for journalists working today. We take great pride in adding him to the roster of Hitchens Prize winners.”

The award comes with a $50,000 cash prize. Packer was honored at a ceremony held in New York, in association with The Atlantic. His powerful acceptance speech, titled “The Enemies of Writing”, can be read in its entirety on the The Atlantic website.