NBF to Honor Walter Mosley with Lifetime Achievement

The National Book Foundation has announced that it will award Walter Mosley with the 2020 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The award will be presented to Mosley by two-time National Book Award Finalist Edwidge Danticat.

Mosley has written more than sixty critically acclaimed books across subject, genre, and category, and his books have been translated into 25 languages and won him numerous awards including, but not limited to, an Edgar Award for Down the River Unto the Sea, an O. Henry Award, The Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award, a Grammy, several NAACP Image awards, and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2020, he was named the recipient of the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. 

Mosley is the thirty-third recipient of the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, created in 1988 to recognize a lifetime of literary achievement. Previous recipients include Edmund White, Isabel Allende, Annie Proulx, Robert A. Caro, John Ashbery, Judy Blume, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, E.L. Doctorow, Maxine Hong Kingston, Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Elmore Leonard, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, and Adrienne Rich.