Annie Proulx Gave One of the Best National Book Award Speeches in Recent Memory / by Boris Kachka

The least suspenseful part of the National Book Award ceremony can be the most fun: the speech given by each year’s winner of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Winners of that lifetime-achievement prize tend to be over 80, and to expound passionately on the general theme of “kids today.” In 2013 E.L. Doctorow seemed to argue that technology would eat our brains; the following year Ursula Le Guin called the assembled book publishers “commodity profiteers.” (No one is really sure what Gore Vidal said in 2009.) Last night, 2017 winner Annie Proulx gave one of the best speeches in recent memory, maybe because her conclusion was so gleefully ironic, and her gloom so well grounded in a year that truly does, on so many levels, suck. Here it is in full: .... [mehr] http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/annie-proulx-national-book-award-speech.html