The National Book Foundation has awarded Barbara Kingsolver a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (DCAL), which has previously been given to Toni Morrison, Philip Roth and Joan Didion among others.
FILE - Barbara Kingsolver appears at the White House for the State Dinner for Kenya's President William Ruto and Kenya's first lady Rachel Ruto, Thursday, May 23, 2024, in Washington. this year's recipient of a National Book Award medal for literary achievement, remembers well the years she couldn't imagine receiving such honors.
“I feel like I’ve been on this steady course, and it’s a remarkable and wonderful feeling to be appreciated and honored this way by my peers,” Kingsolver said. “It’s not someone outside the field. It’s the people who see literature as our livelihood and our spiritual anchor. And that means the world to me.”
Kingsolver has received numerous other awards, including a National Humanities Medal, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction — twice. She even established her own award, the Bellwether Prize for Social Change, which has cited books by Lisa Ko and Gayle Brandeis among others.
Over the past generation, Kingsolver has seen changes she believes enabled voices like hers to be heard. When she started out, she says, the anti-Communist blacklists of the 1950 and 60s had still left the artistic landscape “scarred,” reluctant to take on issues beyond families and relationships. But more recently she has welcomed what she calls “green sprigs of grass,” writers such as Jesmyn Ward and Colson Whitehead who take on race, or the environmental fiction of Richard Powers.
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