Judy Blume among authors given prizes by arts academy
Judy Blume will receive a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which also is honoring Elizabeth Kolbert, Paul Beatty and more than a dozen other writers.
Blume is being given the E. B. White Award, a $10,000 prize for young people’s literature, the academy said Thursday. Beatty, author of the prize-winning novel “The Sellout,” is among eight writers chosen for a $10,000 Arts and Letters prize for literary excellence. The others are Ayad Akhtar, Chris Bachelder, Kathleen Graber, Jennifer Haigh, Dominique Morisseau, Richard Sieburth and Luis Alberto Urrea.
Kolbert, a New Yorker staff writer whose books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Sixth Extinction,” is receiving a $25,000 award for achievement in nonfiction. Another New Yorker writer, dance critic Joan Acocella, won a $20,000 prize for “prose style.”
Two authors who have been National Book Award finalists for fiction have been selected for prizes. Dana Spiotta has received the $20,000 John Updike Award for a midcareer writer. Karan Mahajan won a $10,000 award for a young writer of “considerable literary talent.”
The academy awarded 19 writers in all. The prizes will be handed out in May at the academy’s annual ceremonial.
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