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Erdrich wins Library of Congress fiction prize
Novelist Louise Erdrich will be honored with the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction this year.
Erdrich is the author of such acclaimed novels as “Love Medicine,” “The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse,” “The Plague of Doves” and her current novel, “The Round House.”
Librarian of Congress James Billington announced the recipient of the fiction prize earlier this week.
Erdrich will receive the prize pn Sept. 5 at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.
Billington says Erdrich has had a remarkable string of novels in which she portrayed her fellow Native Americans like no other writer has, by exploring the cultural challenges that native and mixed-race Americans face.
On her Facebook page, Erdrich thanked those who congratulated her on the award. And, she wrote, “It seems that these awards are given to a writer entirely different from the person I am — ordinary and firmly fixed… Given the life I lead, it is surprising these books got written. Maybe I owe it all to my first job — hoeing sugar beets. I stare at lines of words all day and chop out the ones that suck life from the rest of the sentence. Eventually all those rows add up.”
Erdrich is the third winner of the fiction prize, following E.L. Doctorow last year and Don DeLillo in 2013.
On the Web …
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