October 11, 2022, 12:45pm
The Paris Review has announced that Vivian Gornick will receive the 2023 Hadada Award, which recognizes lifetime achievement and is given to “a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.”
Mona Simpson, publisher of The Paris Review, praised Gornick in a statement for documenting “the vicissitudes of friendship, the accomplishments and still unrealized work of the feminist movement so far, the textured joys, terrors, and longings of living alone.” She added:
Had someone described the totality of Gornick’s books to me before I’d read them—a series of essays and memoirs in continuous first-person, without the friction of a second sensibility to come up against, with no threat or hope of a love-story ending—I would guess that I’d have felt claustrophobic, drowned out. But there are I’s and there are I’s. Gornick, like her admired Sebald, pulls off her enormously ambitious interior project—with brash, deep humor, and with a burning interrogation of the many selves she was before this one, here and now, the one talking to us from the page.
Previous recipients of the award include Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Jamaica Kincaid, and John Ashbery. Gornick will receive the award at The Paris Review‘s Spring Revel in April.
[via The Paris Review]