Review honors Roger Angell, Umberto Eco

Roger Angell, the renowned baseball writer who has also been fiction editor of the New Yorker, and Umberto Eco, the Italian author of such best-selling novels as The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, have been named the winners of the 2005 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. The announcement was made by Review editor David Lynn on behalf of the journal's board of trustees.

Angell will be recognized for his outstanding contributions to American literature, from his own eloquent essays on sports to his work nurturing literary excellence as an editor. Eco, a philosopher and historian as well as a novelist, will receive a special international award for his masterful and richly rewarding fiction.

The awards will be presented at a gala dinner on Thursday, November 10, at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York City. Members of the literary community, including past winners of the award, and other luminaries are expected to be on hand.

"Umberto Eco is a writer of singular international importance," says Lynn. "His novels, books, and essays have entertained and challenged us. More important, they have changed the way we perceive the world and human attempts to make sense of it."

Of Angell, Lynn says, "For more than half a century, Roger Angell has been both a magnificent writer--often using baseball as a threshold into lyrical inquiries on American life--and an influential fiction editor at the New Yorker, selecting and shaping the work of the best known authors in the world."

The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement was first presented in 2002 to novelist E.L. Doctorow. In 2003 the recipient was novelist and short-story writer Joyce Carol Oates, and last year the award went to poet Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel laureate in literature.

The presenting sponsors for this year's event are the Chicago Sun-Times, Richard C. Breeden & Co., Bloomberg, Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP, and UBS Securities LLC. Paul B. Healy '85, chair of the Review's board of trustees and vice president of corporate investor relations for Hollinger International, is chair of the event.

Proceeds from the dinner, and from the live and silent auctions that accompany it, benefit the Review's endowment fund.