Oprah Winfrey to receive honorary PEN/Faulkner award: 'She has been like a lighthouse'
It pays to be a bookworm.
The most famous bookworm of them all, Oprah Winfrey, is receiving a literary honor for her work championing authors over the past quarter century.
The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has announced it is giving Winfrey its inaugural Literary Champion award, a lifetime achievement prize for contributions to literacy and for inspiring younger readers and writers. PEN/Faulkner is otherwise known for the annual fiction prize it has presented since 1981.
"Oprah Winfrey is a literary force field," PEN/Faulkner board vice president Mary Haft said in a statement Tuesday. "She has been like a lighthouse, standing sentry and shining a beacon of light onto literature and into the lives of writers and readers."
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With over 90 selections, Oprah's Book Club, founded in 1996, has championed emerging and acclaimed literary voices to a worldwide audience of readers. On Sept. 17, 2021, Oprah's Book Club celebrated 25 years. "From the time I was a little girl, books have guided me," Winfrey wrote on Instagram to mark the milestone. "They’ve helped me see and understand the world and myself. I owe a debt of gratitude to all the brilliant authors over the decades who have led me to conclude: There is no best life without books."
Recent book club selections include "The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self," by Martha Beck; "Bewilderment," by Richard Powers; and "The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois" by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, which recently won the fiction prize from the National Book Critics Circle.
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Winfrey has also helped bring books to the big screen: She was nominated for a supporting actress Oscar for her role in Steven Spielberg's 1985 adaptation of "The Color Purple"; in 1998, she produced and starred in an adaptation of Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's book "Beloved" directed by Jonathan Demme; and in 2018, she played Mrs. Which in Ava DuVernay's adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's children's classic "A Wrinkle in Time."
Winfrey received an honorary National Book Award in 1999. She will accept her PEN/Faulkner award during a virtual ceremony to be held May 2.
Contributing: Associated Press