Ayaan Hirsi Ali receives fourth Edmund Burke Award

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NEW YORK, April 22, 2016—Last night Ayaan Hirsi Ali was honored by The New Criterion with the fourth Edmund Burke Award at a gala dinner at the Metropolitan Club in New York City. The Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture & Society honors individuals who have made conspicuous contributions to the defense of civilization. Through her exemplary career as a writer and public servant, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has embodied the spirit of this award, asserting the crucial and innate importance of the freedoms we cherish in the West. In her bestselling books Infidel and Heretic, she has championed these values against the global threat of religious extremist ideology. Her insight and candor make her an invaluable leader in the ongoing struggle for civilization.

In his opening remarks, Roger Kimball, the editor of The New Criterion, said “A critical prerequisite to dealing with an existential threat is having the courage to call things by their real names. This is something that Ayaan has done with exemplary fortitude and forthrightness in several books and countless personal appearances.”

The gala dinner in New York to honor Ms. Hirsi Ali benefited The New Criterion, an influential monthly review of the arts and intellectual life, and the award, which was first presented to Dr. Henry Kissinger in 2012, gives homage to the inspiration provided by Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century political philosopher.

ABOUT The New Criterion

The New Criterion (www.newcriterion.com) is a New York-based monthly literary magazine and journal of artistic and cultural criticism, edited by Roger Kimball. It was founded in 1982 by Hilton Kramer, the former art critic for The New York Times and Samuel Lipman, a pianist and music critic. The New Criterion draws inspiration and its name from The Criterion, a British literary magazine edited by T. S. Eliot from 1922 to 1939. For over three decades, it has featured criticism of poetry, theatre, art, music, the media, and books from America’s leading commentators.

Since its inception, the magazine has been home to many of the smartest minds in cultural journalism including Donald Kagan, Henry Kissinger, Mark Steyn, Andrew Roberts, Theodore Dalrymple, Joseph Epstein, Denis Donoghue, William F. Buckley Jr., Andrew C. McCarthy, and Charles Murray.

The Times Literary Supplement has said “The New Criterion is probably more consistently worth reading than any other magazine in English.” The Wall Street Journal has said “it operates as a refuge for a civilizing element in short supply in contemporary America: honest criticism” and calls The New Criterion “the best art magazine and a provocative force in other cultural areas.”

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