Blair plans to donate the $100,000 in prize money to the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative, two of the organizations he has created since leaving office in 2007.
Blair arrives in Philadelphia just as he is reemerging into the spotlight with the publication this month of A Journey: My Political Life. An immediate bestseller, the memoir has brought its author much of the same praise and criticism that his 10 years as prime minister did.
Protesters have flocked to book-signing events to castigate him for being President George W. Bush's "poodle" and leading Britain into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But reviewers have praised Blair for his candor about political life and his complex motivations.
Blair served as prime minister from 1997 to 2007, the longest term of any Labor Party leader. The boyish-looking Blair championed a "new Labor" that was centrist and business-friendly, and he led the party to an unprecedented three consecutive general-election victories.
He was a key broker of the 1998 Good Friday Accord, which created a power-sharing agreement and ended sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. And he led a reluctant Europe to intervene, with the United States, in the Balkans in 1999 to rescue Kosovo from genocide and "ethnic cleansing."
His subsequent support of the U.S.-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, with the commitment of thousands of British troops, eventually cost him his popularity at home, and he resigned.
He has spent much of the time since working abroad, trying to create a long-term peace between Israel and the Palestinians as a special U.N. envoy to the Mideast.
His Africa Governance Initiative works in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, fighting malaria, poverty, and corruption.
