Harry Mark Petrakis To Receive Lifetime Achievement Award

Harry Mark Petrakis has been writing very good books for a very long time. He started writing short

stories in the late 1940s and finally sold one to The Atlantic in 1955, or nearly six decades ago. At 91, Harry continues to produce literature at the highest levels, is working now on another memoir, Song of My Life, that he says will be more forthcoming still than his other memoirs. In those six decades, Harry has established himself as the premiere chronicler of Chicago’s Greek Town. He has set much of his fiction there. He has authored essays based on his long experiences living in that neighborhood. He has written about his travels to Greece, and his family history of immigration from Crete to America. He has explored Greek history and mythology--its heroes, literary and otherwise. In short, Harry has created and recreated a world of vast possibility and tragedy, a world of gamblers and gangsters, priests and peasants, cabbies and cooks: generations upon generations of the lucky and the cursed. Kurt Vonnegut once blurbed, “I’ve often thought what a wonderful basketball team could be formed from Petrakis characters. Everyone of them is at least fourteen feet tall.”

The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame will present Harry Mark Petrakis its Fuller Award for lifetime achievement on Saturday, Oct. 4 at the National Hellenic Museum. The ceremony, which runs from 7 until 9 p.m., will include dramatic readings, music, food and drink. Harry will be there to make a speech upon his acceptance of the award.

For more details about the Fuller Award ceremony, visit our eventbrite link at:

http://www.eventbrite.com/e/clhof-harry-mark-petrakis-2014-fuller-lifetime-achievement-award-tickets-12925260803

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Donald G. Evans is the founder and executive director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. He is the author of the novel Good Money After Bad and short story collection An Off-White Christmas, as well as the editor of the anthology Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year. He is the Chicago editor of the Great Lakes Cultural Review. He serves on the American Writers Museum's Chicago Literary Council and the committee that selects the Harold Washington Literary Award.


donaldgevans@hotmail.com