In her speech at the National Book Awards on Wednesday, Ursula K. Le Guin shares her Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters with “all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long,” blasts the commercialization of literature and the greed of publishers, and predicts:
I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now . . . and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who remember freedom: poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.
