Margaret Atwood named honorary member of arts academy
May 6, 2015, 4:48 PM
FILE - In this Oct. 24, 2008 file photo, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood arrives for the 2008 Prince of Asturias award ceremony in Oviedo, northern Spain. Atwood, has been named a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Other foreign inductees include Italian author Roberto Calasso and British composer Peter Maxwell Davies. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza, File)
(AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — One of the world’s most celebrated writers, Canada’s Margaret Atwood, has been named a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The academy also told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Robert Gottlieb, one of the world’s most celebrated book editors, has been awarded a Distinguished Service to the Arts prize.
Atwood, 75, is best known for her dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and for such fiction as “Cat’s Eye” and “The Robber Bride.”
Other new foreign inductees include Italian author Roberto Calasso, British composer Peter Maxwell Davies, Canadian composer Raymond Murray Schafer and Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima.
Earlier this year, Roger Angell, Sherman Alexie and Dave Eggers were among five new inductees voted into the academy’s core membership of 250 writers, musicians, artists and architects
Gottlieb, 84, has edited such classics as Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” and Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker,” and is a dance critic, biographer and a former editor of The New Yorker.
The academy also announced that former U.S. poet laureate Louise Glueck was voted a gold medal for poetry and composer George Crumb a gold medal for music. William H. Gass has won the academy’s William Dean Howells Medal for the best novel of the past five years. Gass was cited for his 2013 book “Middle C.”
The academy is an honor society based in New York and founded in 1898, with members over the years ranging from James Baldwin and William Faulkner to Leonard Bernstein and Jasper Johns.
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