NEW YORK, March 10, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Manhattan Institute has announced that James Grant has won the 2015 Hayek Book Prize for his book The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash that Cured Itself (Simon & Schuster). Grant will receive a $50,000 award and will deliver the annual Hayek lecture in New York in June.
"To share in the luminousness of the Hayek name is a thrill beyond compare. I am humbled, grateful and delighted, in equal measure," said James Grant.
Amity Shlaes, who chairs the jury for the prize, said, "At a time when the automatic response of governments to a recession is to intervene, Grant reminds us that the opposite response, no intervention, has also worked."
"The Hayek Book Prize celebrates authors who best represent the principles of F.A. Hayek. James Grant's book not only represents those principles but does so by reflecting both the scholarship and universal nature of Hayek," Manhattan Institute President Larry Mone added.
The Hayek Book Prize is awarded in New York each year. The finalists for this year's prize were:
- The Forgotten Depression: 1921: The Crash that Cured Itself, by James Grant (Simon & Schuster)
- The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government, by Philip K. Howard (W.W. Norton & Co)
- Recasting India: How Entrepreneurship is Revolutionizing the World's Largest Democracy, by Hindol Sengupta (Palgrave Macmillan Trade)
- The Market and Other Orders (The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek), by F.A. Hayek, edited by Bruce Caldwell (University of Chicago Press)
- Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?, by Karen Dawisha (Simon & Schuster)
- The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor, by William Easterly (Basic Books)
About the Hayek Lecture and Book Prize
Political philosopher and Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek, author of groundbreaking works such as The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty, was the key figure in the twentieth century revival of classical liberalism. He was also a formative influence on the Manhattan Institute. When our founder, Sir Antony Fisher, asked how best to reverse the erosion of freedom, Hayek advised him not to begin with politics per se but to fight first on the battlefield of ideas. The Hayek Lecture and Prize affirm and celebrate this mission.