The National Book Foundation Medal
for Distinguished Contribution
to American Letters

 

Video of Ursula K. Le Guin delivering her acceptance speech on 19 November 2014. Transcript below.

 

Speech in Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

To the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long — my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for fifty years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book 6 or 7 times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this — letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

Thank you.

Ursula K. Le Guin
November 19, 2014

This text may be quoted without obtaining permission from the author, or copied in full so long as the copyright information is included:

Copyright © 2014 Ursula K. Le Guin

 

From Ursula —

In my acceptance speech for the NBF Medal, I use the words “beautiful reward” more than once. I thought people would recognize it as a quote from The Boss: My Beautiful Reward.

But it seems mostly they don’t. “Lucky Town” has kind of sunk out of sight; it was a while ago, and he wasn’t with the E Street Band then. But it’s got some of his songs that I love best in it — this one, Local Hero, Big Muddy — oh, most of the album!

Anyhow, I wanted to say that I used those words with that song in mind, and as a tribute to a great artist whose work I love.

— Ursula
Thanksgiving Day 2014

 

From Ursula —

To all the old friends and new friends who’ve contacted me to tell me they liked what I said — I wish I could thank each one of you.

I can’t do that. But I can share with you my feeling about what the unexpectedly strong response to my talk tells me:

There are a lot of us “people of the book” who aren’t willing to define value only in terms of salability, or to become grateful fiefs of the market lords, but who intend to write and publish as we see fit and get a fair price for it. Facing the endlessly divisive power of growth capitalism, we — writers, publishers, readers — are beginning to remember that, if we stick together in our own interest and “keep our eyes on the prize,” we really are a power in our own right. A friendly power . . .

— Ursula
22 November 2014