Tim O'Brien won the 2013 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. The $100,000 prize will be presented on November 16. “I'm delighted and honored to receive this very special award, which in previous years has gone to such distinguished writers,” said O’Brien. “To find myself in their company is both immensely satisfying and a little daunting.”

The selection of O’Brien, a novelist and short story writer, marks the first time the award has been given to a fiction writer. “Tim O'Brien's fiction about Vietnam, which derives from his own experience as a soldier, is haunting, evocative, and wonderfully inventive,” said Rick Atkinson, recipient of the 2011 literature award. “Yet his writing transcends that particular war in that particular era to illuminate our sense of war universally.”

O'Brien's works include If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, The Things They Carried, and Going After Cacciato.