National Book Award - Medal For Distinguished Contribution (lifetime)

Medal For Distinguished Contribution (lifetime)

The Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters is a lifetime achievement award presented by the Foundation at the final ceremony for the Book Awards. The medal comes with a cash prize of $10,000. It recognizes someone who "has enriched literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work."

  • 1988: Jason Epstein
  • 1989: Daniel Boorstin
  • 1990: Saul Bellow
  • 1991: Eudora Welty
  • 1992: James Laughlin
  • 1993: Clifton Fadiman
  • 1994: Gwendolyn Brooks
  • 1995: David McCullough
  • 1996: Toni Morrison
  • 1997: Studs Terkel
  • 1998: John Updike
  • 1999: Oprah Winfrey
  • 2000: Ray Bradbury
  • 2001: Arthur Miller
  • 2002: Philip Roth
  • 2003: Stephen King
  • 2004: Judy Blume
  • 2005: Norman Mailer
  • 2006: Adrienne Rich
  • 2007: Joan Didion
  • 2008: Maxine Hong Kingston
  • 2009: Gore Vidal
  • 2010: Tom Wolfe
  • 2011: John Ashbery
  • 2012: Elmore Leonard

Five of the seventeen Medalists through 2004 were previous National Book Award winners (Bellow, Welty, McCullough, Updike, and Roth, all but McCullough for fiction). Since then all Medalists have been Award winners, five for nonfiction and two for poetry.

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