Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Richard Ford at his home in East Boothbay, Maine. Photo by John Ewing
Maine author Richard Ford has won the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, the library announced Thursday.
Ford, 75, lives in Boothbay and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for “Independence Day.”
The annual award was created by the library in 2008 as a lifetime achievement award for fiction writers. It’s meant to honor a writer whose body of work is “distinguished not only for its mastery of the art but also for its originality of thought and imagination,” the announcement of the award read.
In announcing the award Thursday morning, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden referred to Ford as “the Babe Ruth of novelists.”
“He is quintessentially American, profoundly human, meticulous in his craft, daring on the field, and he hits it consistently out of the park,” Hayden said in a statement Thursday. She also called Ford “one of the most eloquent writers of his generation.”
Ford, a native of Mississippi, will receive the award on Aug. 31 at the Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Other recipients of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction include Herman Wouk, John Grisham, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth and E.L. Doctorow. Last year’s winner also has a Maine connection: E. Annie Proulx, 83, who spent time growing up in Portland and graduated from Deering High School in 1953.
Besides “Independence Day,” which also won the PEN/Faulkner Award, Ford’s books include “The Sportswriter,” “Let Me Be Frank with You” and “Canada.” He’s also published a memoir, “Between Them: Remembering My Parents.” Nominations for the award this year came from 60 authors and literary critics around the world.
“The good fortune of being given this prize – even apart from its private encouragement – is to be allowed to participate in what I’ve always taken to be the Library’s great achievement: to encourage literacy, to advocate for the primacy of the literary arts and to draw closer to the needs of readers,” Ford said in the statement announcing the award. He said the prize makes him feel “useful to our country’s conversation with the world.”
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