Lifetime Awards by Last Name
John Barth
1998 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award
John Barth’s novels include Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera; The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor; Tidewater Tales; Sabbatical: A Romance; Giles Goat-Boy or, The Revised New Syllabus; and The Sot-Weed Factor. His two short story collections are On with the Story and Lost in the Funhouse.
Mr. Barth has written, “We tell stories and listen to them because we live stories and live in them. Narrative equals language equals life: To cease to narrate…is to die.” Mr. Barth, who is professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998.
John Barth Bio and Cross Links
...HideRobert Creeley
2001 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award
Robert Creeley, poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, editor, and teacher, was born in Arlington, Massachusetts in 1926. He entered Harvard University in 1943, leaving after one year to drive an ambulance in India and Burma during World War II.
During the 1950s, after dropping out of Harvard, he taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and was an editor of its innovative literary journal, the Black Mountain Review.
Robert Creeley Bio and Cross Links
...HideWilliam Gass
1997 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award
William Gass is a novelist, essayist, philosopher, and teacher. Mr. Gass, whose books include Cartesian Sonata, The Tunnel, and Omensetter’s Luck, received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. William Gass states in his essay Culture, Self, and Society , “A culture morally and functionally fails which does not let its crazies, its artists and its saints, its scientists and politicians, claim, on occasion, a higher law than its own congresses can pass, traditions permit, or conscience conceive.”
William Gass Bio and Cross Links
...HidePeter Matthiessen
2002 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award
Peter Matthiessen, born in 1927, is a writer, naturalist, and explorer who has been praised as one of the “shamans of literature.” Mr. Matthiessen, whose work has been influenced by his practice of Zen Buddhism and his interest in indigenous cultures, lives in Sagaponack, New York.
Peter Matthiessen Bio and Cross Links
...HideW.S. Merwin
2004 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award
W.S. Merwin poet, translator, and environmental activist, has become one of the most widely read poets in America, with a career spanning five decades. The son of a Presbyterian minister, for whom he began writing hymns at the age of five, Merwin went to Europe as a young man and developed a love of languages that led to work as a literary translator.
Over the years, his poetic voice has moved from the more formal and medieval to a more distinctly American voice. W.S. Merwin’s recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held anti-imperialist, pacifist, and environmentalist beliefs. In 2005 he will have three new books: Migration: Selected Poems 1951-2001; a book of poems called Present Company; and the memoir Summer Doorways which chronicles his days as a student in seminary school and at Princeton, through the next years spent as a tutor for children of privilege living abroad.
William Merwin was the recipient of the 2004 Lannan Literary Lifetime Achievement Award.
W.S. Merwin Bio and Cross Links
...HideAdrienne Rich
1999 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award
Adrienne Rich received the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999. Born in 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland, she has written more than sixteen books of poetry, including Midnight Salvage, Dark Fields of the Republic, and An Atlas of the Difficult World.
Her essay collections include What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics; Blood, Bread, and Poetry; On Lies, Secrets, and Silence; and Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution.
While in residence Ms. Rich worked on a group of new poems.
Adrienne Rich Bio and Cross Links
...HideEdward Said
2001 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award
Edward Said, a renowned cultural and literary critic, was born in Jerusalem, Palestine, and was educated there, in Egypt, and the United States.
His books include Orientalism; The Question of Palestine; Covering Islam; Culture and Imperialism; Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography; Representations of the Intellectual; and The Politics of Dispossession. He has also published a memoir, Out of Place.
Mr. Said is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
Edward Said Bio and Cross Links
...HideGilbert Sorrentino
2005 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award
Gilbert Sorrentino, “like a reckless heir to Borges, Barthelme and Groucho Marx, co-opts the language of critical discourse to subvert his audience’s preconceptions and, in so doing, redraws the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ art” (The New York Times). For much of the 1950’s and 60’s, Sorrentino published literary journals and magazines and in 1965 took a job at Grove Press where his first editing assignment was Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Sorrentino’s first novel, The Sky Changes, was published in 1966, and over 20 titles of fiction and poetry have followed. In 1973, Sorrentino published his most commercially successful work, Mulligan Stew. Of his novel, Blue Pastoral, the Atlantic Monthly says, “Sorrentino demonstrates, with a steady flow of puns, parodies, misquotations (deliberate), incorrect historical references (ditto), and hideous verse (presumably also ditto), that the country abounds in foolishness.”
Gilbert Sorrentino Bio and Cross Links
...HideAnne Stevenson
2007 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award
After more than 40 years living in Britain, the American lyric poet Anne Stevenson “has never lost that sense of being on the edge of things, artistically and geographically (and) that is where the clarity and perspective of her art come from” according to England’s Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. Much admired in poetry circles on both sides of the Atlantic and often cited as a role model for women poets, she has published 17 volumes of poetry noted for their musical quality.
Anne Stevenson Bio and Cross Links
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