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National Book Foundation Honors Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters "in recognition of her transformative impact on American literature. For more than forty years, Le Guin has defied conventions of narrative, language, character, and genre, as well as transcended the boundaries between fantasy and realism, to forge new paths for literary fiction." She is the Foundation’s twenty-seventh recipient.
The medal was presented to Le Guin by author Neil Gaiman during this year's National Book Awards ceremony on November 19th. According to NPR, LeGuin "stole the show" with her frank comments about the publishing business.
Lamenting the lack of recognition for Science Fiction and Fantasy authors over the decades, she said:
"I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being and even imagine some real grounds for hope."
"We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality. Right now I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profits and advertising revenues is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship."
She went on to lambast the publishing business for giving sales departments editorial control and "selling us like deodorant," chided her own publisher for overcharging libraries for ebooks, and Amazon "punishing a publisher for disobedience."
"Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words," she concluded. "The name of our beautiful reward is not profit -- its name is freedom."
Watch LeGuin's six minute-long acceptance speech here.
Each year the National Book Foundation presents National Book Awards in four categories: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry and Young People's Literature. See the 2014 results here.
About Ursula K. Le Guin:
Born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, and educated at Radcliffe College and Columbia University, Ursula K. Le Guin published her first novel, Rocannon’s World, in 1966. Over the course of her literary career, Le Guin has published twenty-two novels, eleven volumes of short stories, seven books of poetry, four collections of essays, thirteen books for children, and five works of translation. Her first major work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, established Le Guin’s reputation for daring experimentation and her internationally best-selling Books of Earthsea have been translated into thirty-one languages.
The recipient of numerous awards and honors, Le Guin won a National Book Award in 1973 for The Farthest Shore, and was a Finalist in 1972 for The Tombs of Atuan and in 1985 for Always Coming Home. Le Guin also has received a PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction, a Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, twenty-one Locus Awards, six Nebula Awards, five Hugo Awards, three Asimov’s Readers Awards, a Pushcart Prize, a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and a Newbery Silver Medal. Le Guin’s lifetime achievement awards include the title of Grand Master from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the Margaret A. Edwards Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), the Willamette Writers Lifetime Achievement Award, the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award, the University of California-Riverside’s Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Maxine Cushing Gray Fellowship for distinguished body of work from the Washington Center for the Book.