TORONTO — A former American military adviser's account of the U.S. war in Afghanistan is the winner of this year's Lionel Gelber Prize for a book on global affairs.
Jurors awarded the $15,000 honour on Tuesday to Carter Malkasian's "The American War in Afghanistan: A History," published by Oxford University Press.
The book chronicles the history of the conflict drawing from Malkasian's first-hand knowledge of Afghanistan and the military.
The historian, who is fluent in Pashto, spent nearly two years in Helmand province's Garmsir district as a representative of the U.S. State Department.
Malkasian later served as special assistant for strategy to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford from 2015 to 2019.
Presented by the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and Foreign Policy Magazine, the Lionel Gelber Prize is handed out annually to the world's top English non-fiction book on international affairs.
This year's runners-up were: "How to End a Plague: America's Fight to Defeat AIDS in Africa" by Emily Bass; "The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order" by Rush Doshi; "Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe" by Niall Ferguson; and "In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust" by Jeffrey Veidlinger.
The prize was founded in 1989 by Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 12, 2022.
The Canadian Press
