Richard Howard, a poet and emeritus professor in the Writing Program, will receive the Paris Review’s 2017 Hadada Prize. According to the Review’s website, the Hadada Prize is a “lifetime-achievement award, presented annually to a distinguished member of the writing community who has made a strong and unique contribution to literature.” Howard’s award will be presented at the Paris Review’s annual spring revel, which this year will take place at Cipriani 42nd Street, in Manhattan, on April 4.
In its notice about the award, the Review highlighted Howard’s considerable output as a poet and translator—he’s published 16 collections of poetry and has translated work by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault—as well as his tenure as poetry editor at the Review, where he helped elevate younger writers such as Sarah Manguso and Ben Lerner.
Of reading the work of younger writers, Howard said, in an Art of Poetry interview with the Paris Review, “The pleasure of seeing new work become expert and characteristic of the new poet never fails …. I have a pretty even balance of interest in the poetry of the past and the poetry coming into being. The energy necessary for both interests doesn’t have to be sustained—it sustains me.”
Over the course of his career, Howard has received numerous other awards and honors, including the MacArthur “genius” grant and the Literary Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
When he receives the Hadada Prize in April, he’ll join a long and luminous list of recipients that includes Lydia Davis, John Ashbery, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and William Styron, among others.