Chicago Tribune's 2011 literary awards to Jonathan Franzen

American author Jonathan Franzen, who will visit Göteborg Book Fair this year, is one of three winners of the Chicago Tribune's 2011 literary awards.

Jonathan Franzen will receive the Heartland Prize for his fiction "Freedom" that depicts troubled Midwestern family members who struggle with their identities on their way between Minnesota and the East Coast. It was greatly acclaimed and became a Time magazine cover upon its release in 2010.

His previous novel "The Corrections", in which he explores the interplay between the two regions dividing a dysfunctional family, the Midwest and East Coast, also won him the 2001 National Book Award for fiction.
"The announcement of the Heartland Prize came out of the blue for me," Franzen stressed. "I was delighted because I have strong connections to Chicago, I always love going back there. It was very nice, if not life-changing for me at this point, and not having gotten it would also not have been life-changing. One grasps for a better word than 'nice' and fails to find one," the writer added.

Franzen is awarded together with two other authors, Stephen Sondheim and Isabel Wilkerson.

Sondheim has been awarded numerous prizes including a Pulitzer Prize (for drama "Sunday in the Park With George," 1985), an Academy Award (for best song "Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)" from "Dick Tracy," 1990), eight Grammy Awards and eight Tony Awards. He is also the author of the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein's music for "West Side Story" (1957), and for two more smash hits – "Gypsy'" (1959) and "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" (1962).

Isabel Wilkerson gets the award for her nonfiction "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration"). She spent a lot of time in Chicago researching Ida Mae Gladney, an immigrant from rural Mississippi to Chicago in 1937 who is one of the main characters in her book "The warmth of Other Suns". It won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The author had already been quite familiar with Chicago as she worked there as The New York Time's Chicago bureau chief in the 1990s and won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the 1993 floods in the region.