Turkish historian Taner Akcam’s A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility book has won the Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction, reports Star Tribune.

Blogian photo: Taner Akcam talking about his book in Denver’s Mizel Museum on April 15, 2007

For his take on Turkish history, Taner Akçam has been prosecuted, jailed, exiled, detained, threatened, maligned, vilified and harassed. On Saturday, the visiting University of Minnesota professor won a Minnesota Book Award for “A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility.”

Judges for the 19th annual awards called it a “pioneering work” and “scrupulous account of Turkish responsibility for the killing of close to 1 million Armenians” and praised Akçam and his publisher, Metropolitan Books, for “challenging the country’s 90-plus-year denial of intentional genocide.”