Wednesday, April 13, 2005

WRITER: Leah Jewett, 225/578-3151, lwood@lsu.edu
SOURCE: Philip Lee Williams, 706/542-8501, phil@franklin.uga.edu

UGA PROF PHILIP LEE WILLIAMS WINS NATIONAL HONOR FOR CIVIL WAR NOVEL A DISTANT FLAME, PUBLISHED IN THE FALL OF 2004

ATHENS, Ga. - Philip Lee Williams, author of the Civil War novel A Distant Flame (St. Martin's Press, 2004), has been chosen as the winner of the 2004 Michael Shaara Award for Civil War Fiction. The annual award is funded by novelist Jeff Shaara and created by Shaara and the U.S. Civil War Center, a department of the Louisiana State University Libraries' Special Collections.

Williams will receive the national award and read from his winning novel at 5:30 pm on June 16, 2005, at a public ceremony co-hosted by the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. Each year the award ceremony is held in a different location to underscore the national focus of the U.S. Civil War Center's interdisciplinary projects. Past ceremonies have taken place in New Orleans, St. Louis, Atlanta, Albany, Richmond and Nashville.

The book is about Southerners who were against the South's position in the Civil War. Philip Lee Williams is an adjunct professor of creative writing and Franklin College editor at the University of Georgia. He is the author of nine novels, two works of creative non-fiction, poetry, fiction, essays and screenplays, and has written and co-produced three television documentaries. Williams was named Georgia Author of the Year in Fiction in 1991. His award-winning work has also earned him the Townsend Prize for Fiction, and honors from the New York and the Columbus (Ohio) Film Festivals.

Jeff Shaara's father, Michael Shaara, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for the Civil War novel The Killer Angels, on which the movie Gettysburg was based. Historians and novelists frequently point to The Killer Angels as the book that inspired them to write about the Civil War.

Jeff Shaara serves on the U.S. Civil War Center's National Advisory Board. He is the author of the Civil War novels Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure. His most recent novel is To The Last Man: A Novel of the First World War (Ballantine, 2004).

Judges for the 2004 award were Paul Ashdown, professor, School of Journalism and Electronic Media, University of Tennessee; Diana Barrett, historical researcher; and June Pulliam, instructor, department of English, Louisiana State University.

The Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) is a major research library and manuscript repository. Its holdings encompass millions of rare and unique documents and artifacts vital to the study of American history, including many items from the Civil War era. For more information, visit www.masshist.org.

To learn more about the U.S. Civil War Center's projects, including a list of past winners of the Michael Shaara Award, visit www.cwc.lsu.edu.