Lewis named SABEW Distinguished Achievement Award winner

Michael Lews, the financial journalist for Vanity Fair who has written such best-selling books as “Liar’s Poker” and “The Big Short,” has been named the latest recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

Lewis will receive his award at the SABEW annual conference in Phoenix in March 2014. He was selected by a committee led by former SABEW president Jill Jorden Spitz.

Past SABEW Distinguished Achievement Award winners include Carol Loomis of Fortune, Floyd Norris of The New York Times and Stephen Shepard of BusinessWeek.

Lewis  graduated from Princeton with a BA in art history, and in 1985 received his master’s degree from the London School of Economics. Salomon Brothers hired him as a bond salesman shortly after. He moved to New York for training and witnessed firsthand the cutthroat, scruple-free culture that was Wall Street in the 1980s.

Several months later, armed only with what he’d learned in training, Lewis returned to London and spent the next three years dispensing investment advice to Salomon’s well-heeled clientele. He earned hundreds of thousands of dollars and survived a 1987 hostile takeover attempt at the firm. Nonetheless, he grew disillusioned with his job and left Salomon to write an account of his experiences in the industry. Published in 1989, “Liar’s Poker” remains one of the best written and most perceptive chronicles of investment banking and the appalling excesses of an era.

Since then, Lewis has found great success as a financial journalist and bestselling author. His nonfiction ranges over a variety of topics, including U.S./Japanese business relations (“Pacific Rift”), the 1996 presidential campaign (“Trail Fever”), Silicon Valley (“The New New Thing”), and the Internet boom (“Next: The Future Just Happened”).

Lewis won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2009 for feature writing. He also has written for Conde Nast Portfolio.