Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award

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

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The Antelope Wife: A Novel

Louise Erdrich

In an attack on an Indian village, a U.S. cavalryman takes a baby girl, but later gives her back. So begins a multi-generation saga on the girl's descendants as they navigate between modern life and ancient tradition.
The Beet Queen: A Novel

Louise Erdrich

On a spring morning in 1932, young Karl and Mary Adare arrive by boxcar in Argus, North Dakota. After being orphaned in a most peculiar way, they seek refuge in the butcher shop of their aunt Fritzie and her husband, Pete; ordinary Mary, who will cause a miracle, and seductive Karl, who lacks his sister's gift for survival, embark upon an exhilarating life-journey crowded with colorful, unforgettable characters and marked by the extraordinary magic of natural events.
The Bingo Palace

Louise Erdrich

At the crossroads of his life, Lipsha Morrissey is summoned by his grandmother to return to the reservation. There, he falls in love for the very first time—with the beautiful Shawnee Ray, who's already considering a marriage proposal from Lipsha's wealthy entrepreneurial boss, Lyman Lamartine. But when all efforts to win Shawnee's affections go hopelessly awry, Lipsha seeks out his great-grandmother for a magical solution to his romantic dilemma—on sacred ground where a federally sanctioned bingo palace is slated for construction.
The Birchbark House

Louise Erdrich

Omakayas, a seven-year-old Native American girl of the Ojibwa tribe, lives through the joys of summer and the perils of winter on an island in Lake Superior in 1847
The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth year

Louise Erdrich

A novelist writes of her experiences during a 12 month period through pregnancy, new motherhood, and return to writing.
The Game of Silence

Louise Erdrich

Nine-year-old Omakayas, of the Ojibwa tribe, moves west with her family in 1849.
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse: A Novel

Louise Erdrich

For more than a half century, Father Damien Modeste has served his beloved people, the Ojibwe, on the remote reservation of Little No Horse. Now, nearing the end of his life, Father Damien dreads the discovery of his physical identity, for he is a woman who has lived as a man. To further complicate his quiet existence, a troubled colleague comes to the reservation to investigate the life of the perplexing, possibly false saint Sister Leopolda. Father Damien alone knows the strange truth of Leopolda's piety and is faced with the most difficult decision: Should he tell all and risk everything . . . or manufacture a protective history though he believes Leopolda's wonder-working is motivated solely by evil?
The Masters Butchers Singing Club

Louise Erdrich

Having survived World War I, Fidelis Waldvogel returns to his quiet German village and marries the pregnant widow of his best friend, killed in action. With a suitcase full of sausages and a master butcher's precious knife set, Fidelis sets out for America. In Argus, North Dakota, he builds a business, a home for his family—which includes Eva and four sons—and a singing club consisting of the best voices in town. When the Old World meets the New—in the person of Delphine Watzka—the great adventure of Fidelis's life begins. Delphine meets Eva and is enchanted. She meets Fidelis, and the ground trembles. These momentous encounters will determine the course of Delphine's life.
The Night Watchman

Louise Erdrich

Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.
The Painted Drum: A Novel

Louise Erdrich

While appraising the estate of a New Hampshire family descended from a North Dakota Indian agent, Faye Travers is startled to discover a rare moose skin and cedar drum fashioned long ago by an Ojibwe artisan. And so begins an illuminating journey both backward and forward in time, following the strange passage of a powerful yet delicate instrument, and revealing the extraordinary lives it has touched and defined.
The Plague of Doves: A Novel

Louise Erdrich

The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.
The Porcupine Year

Louise Erdrich

In 1852, forced by the United States government to leave their beloved Island of the Golden Breasted Woodpecker, fourteen-year-old Omakayas and her Ojibwe family travel in search of a new home.
The Range Eternal

Louise Erdrich

In a cabin in the Turtle Mountains of South Dakota, the woodburning stove provided warmth, cooking heat, a glowing screen for a young girl's imagination. It was the true heart of the home, which the girl didn't realize until electricity came to the cabin and the stove was replaced.
The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008

Louise Erdrich

A collection of three dozen short works includes six previously unpublished pieces and offers insight into the author's use of plot twists and contrasting psychological landscapes.
The Round House: A Novel

Louise Erdrich

When his mother, a tribal enrollment specialist living on a reservation in North Dakota, slips into an abyss of depression after being brutally attacked, 13-year-old Joe Coutts sets out with his three friends to find the person that destroyed his family. Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and son, Joe. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared. While his father, who is a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning.
Tracks: A Novel

Louise Erdrich

Told in the alternating voices of a wise Chippewa Indian leader, and a young, embittered mixed-blood woman, the novel chronicles the drama of daily lives overshadowed by the clash of cultures and mythologies.
Route 2

Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris

This book was a joint effort by a husband and wife who wrote marvelously together but their life as a couple ended in tragedy when Michael killed himself. Louise made original drawings for the book.
Grandmother's Pigeon

Louise Erdrich and Jim LaMarche

Passenger pigeon hatchlings, thought to be extinct, are discovered in Grandmother's room after she departs on a voyage to Greenland.
A Prayer for Owen Meany

John Irving

Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen doesn't believe in accidents; he believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul is both extraordinary and terrifying. At moments a comic, self-deluded victim, but in the end the principal, tragic actor in a divine plan, Owen Meany is the most heartbreaking hero John Irving has yet created.
A Son of the Circus

John Irving

An Indian-Canadian doctor returns to Bombay to seek a cure for a disease which afflicts circus dwarfs and is caught up in a serial killing of prostitutes. The action is interspersed with commentary on the lot of social misfits: prostitutes, dwarfs, himself--the doctor regarding himself a foreigner in both India and Canada.
A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound

John Irving

When Tom is awakened by the sound of a "monster," he tells his father what he thinks he heard.
Avenue of Mysteries

John Irving

John Irving returns to the themes that established him as one of our most admired and beloved authors in this absorbing novel of fate and memory. As we grow older—most of all, in what we remember and what we dream—we live in the past. Sometimes, we live more vividly in the past than in the present. As an older man, Juan Diego will take a trip to the Philippines, but what travels with him are his dreams and memories; he is most alive in his childhood and early adolescence in Mexico. “An aura of fate had marked him,” John Irving writes, of Juan Diego. “The chain of events, the links in our lives—what leads us where we’re going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don’t see coming, and what we do—all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious.” Avenue of Mysteries is the story of what happens to Juan Diego in the Philippines, where what happened to him in the past—in Mexico—collides with his future
A Widow for One Year

John Irving

Richly comic as well as deeply disturbing, this is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force. Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.
In One Person

John Irving

An elderly bisexual man looks back upon his life and romances, reflecting on his unfulfilled loves and broken dreams.
Last Night in Twisted River

John Irving

In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable's girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County-to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto-pursued by the implacable constable. Their lone protector is a fiercely libertarian logger, once a river driver, who befriends them. A tale that spans five decades.