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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The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood
Iris Chase Griffen ponders the death of her sister, Laura, including an examination of Laura's posthumously published novel, The blind assassin.
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The Edible Woman
Margaret Atwood
Marian has a problem. A willing member of the consumer society in which she lives, she suddenly finds herself identifying with the things being consumed. She can cope with her tidy-minded fiancé́, Peter, who likes shooting rabbits. She can cope with her job in market research, and the antics of her roommate. She can even cope with Duncan, a graduate student who seems to prefer laundromats to women. But not being able to eat is a different matter. Steak was the first to go. Then lamb, pork, and the rest. Next came her incapacity to face an egg. Vegetables were the final straw. But Marian has her reasons, and what happens next provides an unusual solution. Witty, subversive, hilarious, The Edible Woman is dazzling and utterly original. It is Margaret Atwood's brilliant first novel, and the book that introduced her as a consummate observer of the ironies and absurdities of modern life.
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The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood
The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs.
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The Heart Goes Last
Margaret Atwood
"Several years after the world's brutal economic collapse, Stan and Charmaine, a married couple struggling to stay afloat, hear about the Positron Project in the town of Consilience, an experiment in cooperative living that appears to be the answer to their problems - to living in their car, to the lousy jobs, to the vandalism and the gangs, to their piled-up debt. There's just one drawback: once inside Consilience, you don't get out. After weighing their limited options, Stan and Charmaine sign up, and soon they find themselves involved in the town's strategy for economic stability: a pervasive prison system, whereby each citizen lives a double life, as a prisoner one month, and a guard or town functionary the next. At first, Stan and Charmaine enjoy their newfound prosperity. But when Charmaine becomes romantically involved with the man who shares her civilian house, her actions set off an unexpected chain of events that leave Stan running for his life."
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The Journals of Susanna Moodie
Margaret Atwood
This cycle of poems is perhaps the most memorable evocation in modern Canadian literature of the myth of the wilderness, the immigrant experience, and the alienating and schizophrenic effects of the colonial mentality.
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The Penelopiad
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood returns with a shrewd, funny, and insightful retelling of the myth of Odysseus from the point of view of Penelope.
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The Robber Bride
Margaret Atwood
Roz, Charis, and Tony - war babies all - share a wound, and her name is Zenia. Zenia is beautiful and smart and hungry, by turns manipulative and vulnerable, needy and ruthless, the turbulent center of her own never-ending saga. Zenia entered their lives when they were in college, in the sixties; and over the three decades since, she damaged each of them badly, ensnaring their sympathy, betraying their trust, and treating their men as loot. Then Zenia died, or at any rate the three women - with much relief - attended her funeral. But as The Robber Bride begins, she's suddenly alive again, sauntering into the restaurant where they are innocently eating lunch. In this consistently entertaining and profound new novel, Margaret Atwood reports from the farthest reaches of the war between the sexes, provocatively suggesting that if women are to be equal they must realize that they share with men both the capacity for villainy and the responsibility for moral choice. The group of women and men at the center of this funny and wholly involving story all fall prey to a chillingly recognizable menace, which is given power by their own fantasies and illusions. The Robber Bride is a novel to delight in - for its consummately crafted prose, for its rich and devious humor, and, ultimately, for its compassion.
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The Testaments
Margaret Atwood
In this brilliant sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, acclaimed author Margaret Atwood answers the questions that have tantalized readers for decades. When the van door slammed on Offred's future at the end of The Handmaid's Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead. With The Testaments, the wait is over. Margaret Atwood's sequel picks up the story fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.
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The Year of the Flood
Margaret Atwood
When a natural disaster predicted by God's Gardeners leader Adam One obliterates most human life, two survivors trapped inside respective establishments that metaphorically represent paradise and hell wonder if any of their loved ones have survived.
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Wandering Wenda and Widow Wallop’s Wunderground Washery
Margaret Atwood
When Wenda's parents have are whisked away by a weird whirlwind she finds herself alone and fending for herself with the help Wesley the woodchuck. They find themselves the captives of Widow Wallop and are forced to work in her wunderground washery. With the help of Wesley, some wild wolves and the other captive waifs and strays, Wenda learns to help herself and expose the Widow Wallop for who she really is.
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War Bears Vol 1-3
Margaret Atwood
Oursonette, a fictional Nazi-fighting superheroine, is created by Al Zurakowski who dreams of making it big in the world of comics publishing. A story that follows the early days of comics in Toronto, a war that greatly strains Al personally and professionally, and how the rise of post-war American comics puts an end to his dreams.
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Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983-2005
Margaret Atwood
Essays by Margaret Atwood.
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A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural
Wendell Berry
The title of this book is taken from an account by Thomas F. Hornbein on his travels in the Himalayas. “It seemed to me,” Hornbein wrote, “that here man lived in continuous harmony with the land, as much as briefly a part of it as all its other occupants.” Wendell Berry’s second collection of essays, A Continuous Harmony was first published in 1972, and includes the seminal “Think Little,” which was printed in The Last Whole Earth Catalogue and reprinted around the globe, and the splendid centerpiece, “Discipline and Hope,” an insightful and articulate essay making a case for what he calls “a new middle.”
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A Country of Marriage: Poems
Wendell Berry
First published in 1971, The Country of Marriage is Wendell Berry's fifth volume of poetry. What he calls "an expansive metaphor" is "a farmer's relationship to his land as the basic and central relation of humanity to creation." "Similarly, marriage is the basic and central community tie; it begins and stands for the relation we have to family and to the larger circles of human association. And these relationships are in turn basic to, and may stand for, our relationship to God and to the sustaining mysteries and powers of creation."
