Book-length works by recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award (2006-2010) and Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award (2011-) are arranged below in alphabetical order by author. To find an individual honoree’s works, click on her or his name.
Lifetime Achievement Award
- 2006 Studs Terkel
- 2007 Elie Wiesel
- 2008 Taylor Branch
- 2009 Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
- 2010 Geraldine Brooks
Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award
- 2011 Barbara Kingsolver
- 2012 Tim O’Brien
- 2013 Wendell Berry
- 2014 Louise Erdrich
- 2015 Gloria Steinem
- 2016 Marilynne Robinson
- 2017 Colm Tóibín
- 2018 John Irving
- 2019 N. Scott Momaday
- 2020 & 2021 Margaret Atwood
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Life Before Man
Margaret Atwood
Elizabeth, with her controlled sensuality and suppressed rage, has just lost her latest lover to suicide. Nate, her gentle, indecisive husband, is planning to leave her for Lesje, a perennial innocent who prefers dinosaurs to men.
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MaddAddam
Margaret Atwood
Bringing together characters from Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, this thrilling conclusion to Margaret Atwood's speculative fiction trilogy confirms the ultimate endurance of humanity, community, and love. Months after the Waterless Flood pandemic has wiped out most of humanity, Toby and Ren have rescued their friend Amanda from the vicious Painballers. They return to the MaddAddamite cob house, which is being fortified against man and giant Pigoon alike. Accompanying them are the Crakers, the gentle, quasihuman species engineered by the brilliant but deceased Crake. While their reluctant prophet, Jimmy--Crake's one-time friend--recovers from a debilitating fever, it's left to Toby to narrate the Craker theology, with Crake as Creator. She must also deal with cultural misunderstandings, terrible coffee, and her jealousy over her lover, Zeb. Meanwhile, Zeb searches for Adam One, founder of the God's Gardeners, the pacifist green religion from which Zeb broke years ago to lead the MaddAddamites in active resistance against the destructive CorpSeCorps. Now, under threat of an imminent Painballer attack, the MaddAddamites must fight back with the aid of their newfound allies, some of whom have four trotters. At the center is the extraordinary story of Zeb's past, which involves a lost brother, a hidden murder, a bear, and a bizarre act of revenge. Combining adventure, humor, romance, superb storytelling, and an imagination that is at once dazzlingly inventive and grounded in a recognizable world, MaddAddam is vintage Margaret Atwood, and a moving and dramatic conclusion to her internationally celebrated dystopian trilogy.
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Moving Targets: Writing with Intent 1982-2004
Margaret Atwood
The most precious treasure of this collection is that it gives us the rich back-story and diverse range of influences on Margaret Atwood’s work. From the aunts who encouraged her nascent writing career to the influence of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four on The Handmaid's Tale, we trace the movement of Atwood’s fertile and curious mind in action over the years.
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Murder in the Dark
Margaret Atwood
Murder in the Dark is Margaret Atwood's seventh work of fiction or her tenth book of poetry, depending on how you slice it. These short prose forms range from fictionalized autobiography through prose-poetry, mini-romance, and mini-science fiction. A feast of comic entertainment, Murder in the Dark is Atwood at her wittiest, most thoughtful, and most provoking.
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Negotiating with the Dead A Writer on Writing
Margaret Atwood
What is the role of the writer? Seer? Prophet? High Priest of Art? Court Jester? Or witness to the real world? With a light touch, underlined by seriousness, Margaret Atwood examines the metaphors which writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain - or excuse! - their activities.
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Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
A novel of the future explores a world that has been devastated by ecological and scientific disasters.
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Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
Margaret Atwood
Collected here, the Massey Lectures from legendary novelist Margaret Atwood investigate the highly topical subject of debt, exploring debt as an ancient and central motif in religion, literature, and the structure of human societies.
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Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut
Margaret Atwood
Prunella, a proud, prissy princess plans to marry a pinhead prince who will pamper her until a wise old woman's spell puts a purple peanut on the princess's pretty nose.
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Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes
Margaret Atwood
Sick of his present environment, Rude Ramsay and his friends decide to leave their residence on a quest for a more refreshing location.
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Second Words: Selected Critical Prose
Margaret Atwood
The fifty essays in Second Words span the period from 1962 to 1980 and reveal Margaret Atwood's views on feminism, Canadian literature, the creative process, nationalism, sexism, as well as critical commentary on such writers as Erica Jong, E. L. Doctorow, Northrop Frye, Roch Carrier, Marie-Claire Blais, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and many more.
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Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood's superb exploration of stories and storytelling, myths and their reinventions, fiction and fact, the weirdness of nature, and the strangeness of the Canadian North.
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Surfacing
Margaret Atwood
Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec. Setting out with her lover and another young couple, she soon finds herself captivated by the isolated setting, where a marriage begins to fall apart, violence and death lurk just beneath the surface, and sex becomes a catalyst for conflict and dangerous choices. Surfacing is a work permeated with an aura of suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond-sharp prose. Here is a rich mine of ideas from an extraordinary writer about contemporary life and nature, families and marriage, and about women fragmented...and becoming whole.
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Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
Margaret Atwood
When first published in 1972, Survival was considered the most startling book ever written about Canadian literature. Since then, it has continued to be read and taught, and it continues to shape the way Canadians look at themselves. Distinguished, provocative, and written in effervescent, compulsively readable prose, Survival is simultaneously a book of criticism, a manifesto, and a collection of personal and subversive remarks. Margaret Atwood begins by asking: ''What have been the central preoccupations of our poetry and fiction?'' Her answer is ''survival and victims.'' Atwood applies this thesis in twelve brilliant, witty, and impassioned chapters; from Moodie to MacLennan to Blais, from Pratt to Purdy to Gibson, she lights up familiar books in wholly new perspectives. This new edition features a foreword by the author.
