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Lynn Freed was awarded the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award in Literature at the annual induction and award ceremony of the American Academy of Arts and Letters on Wednesday, May 15, 2002, at the Academy's headquarters in New York City. Established by the Literary Trust of Katherine Anne Porter, the biannual monetary award recognizes a fiction writer in mid-career. The members of the Awards Committee for Literature are Hortense Calisher, Galway Kinnell, Robert Pinsky, Horton Foote, Ann Beattie, and Russell Bank. Presented to Ms. Freed by Hortense Calisher, the citation for the award read: "Lynn Freed's trenchant novels, all forays into the lore of her native South Africa, and into areas perhaps new to us, are also seductive meditations, on people, love, and circumstance, that belong to literature at large."

A naturalized U. S. citizen, Lynn Freed was born and grew up in Durban, South Africa. She came to New York as a graduate student, receiving her M.A. (1969) and Ph.D. (1972) in English Literature from Columbia University. After moving to San Francisco, she wrote her first novel, Heart Change (New American Library, 1982; republished by Story Line Press in 2000 as Friends of the Family). Since then, she has published four more novels: Home Ground (William Heinemann Ltd., London; Summit Books/Simon & Schuster, 1986; Penguin, 1987; Penguin Books UK, 1988; Spring, 1999: Story Line Press), The Bungalow (1993: Poseidon/Simon & Schuster; Fall1999: Story Line Press), and The Mirror (1997: Crown Publishers; 1999: Ballantine Books; 1999: Flamingo, HarperCollins UK)-all of which have been on the New York Times "Notable Books of the Year" list. Her new novel is House of Women (2002, Little, Brown & Co. and Flamingo, HarperCollins UK) Ms. Freed's short fiction and essays have appeared in New Yorker, Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, Southwest Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Santa Monica Review, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsday, Mirabella, Elle, House Beautiful, House & Garden, and Vogue. Her work is widely translated and is included in a number of anthologies.

In 1986, Ms. Freed won the Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award for Fiction for Home Ground. In 1993, The Bungalow was nominated for the award, and so, in 1997, was The Mirror. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories and reprinted in a number of anthologies. Home Ground, The Bungalow, and The Mirror have all appeared in the "Notable Books of the Year" of the New York Times. Ms. Freed has received fellowships, grants, and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony.

She is Professor of English at University of California, Davis, and is part of the Core Faculty in the MFA Program at Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont. She has taught in a wide variety of institutions and at summer conferences. These include the City College of San Francisco; St. Mary's College, Moraga, California; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Montana; the University of Oregon; the University of Texas at Austin; Bennington Writing Workshops; Bread Loaf Writers' Conference; Napa Valley Writers' Conference; and Squaw Valley Community of Writers.

The award ceremony took place at 633 West 155th Street, New York City, in the Academy's neoclassical buildings, built in the 1920s at Audubon Terrace, site of the former estate of American artist John James Audubon. A New York City Landmark also on the National Register of Historic Places, the Academy shares its site with the Hispanic Society, the American Numismatic Society, and Boricua College. The Academy was founded in 1904 by the National Institute of Arts and Letters to recognize achievement in the arts. The purpose of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, founded in 1898, is to further literature and the fine arts in the United States. The two organizations were amalgamated in 1976. Limited to a membership of 250, the Institute presents medals and other awards for distinguished achievement, makes grants to further creative work of outstanding merit, and maintains a revolving loan fund to aid artists, musicians, and writers who are unable to continue their work without financial help. The membership of the Academy is limited to fifty persons chosen for special honor from those who at any time have been members of the Institute. The stated purpose of the Academy is to foster, assist, and sustain an interest in the arts by singling out and encouraging individual artists and their work. Incorporated by Act of Congress in 1916, the Academy participates with the Institute in the award of grants and loans, including the Brunner Memorial Award in Architecture and the Gold Medal for excellence in the arts. The members of the Academy confer the Howells Medal, given every five years for a work of American fiction, and the Award of Merit Medal, given in five categories of the arts to a person not affiliated with the Academy. Current members of the Academy include Christo, Jasper Johns, Philip Johnson, Toni Morrison, Stephen Sondheim, and Susan Sontag. The Academy's galleries mount two exhibitions a year on the arts and literature, drawing on the works and experiences of its members and award recipients, some of America's greatest composers, painters, architects, and writers. The Academy's permanent collection includes 25,000 books and 2,000 original manuscripts, paintings, and photographs illuminating the lives and work of members.

It is extremely fitting that the Katherine Anne Porter Award has been established at the Academy, because of her long association with it and its parent organization, the Institute. Katherine Anne Porter was elected a member in the Department of Literature at the annual meeting of the Institute in December 1942 and inducted at the Annual Ceremonial on May 8, 1942. By 1950, she was serving a three-year term on the Council of the Institute with such luminaries as Virgil Thompson, Glenway Wescott, William Rose Benét, and Marc Connelly. She was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in November 1966 and was inducted at the Ceremonial on May 24, 1967, with Kenneth Burke, Henry Steele Commager, John Crowe Ransom, and John Hall Wheelock. On that same occasion, she also was awarded the Gold Medal for Fiction; her friend Glenway Wescott made the presentation. She had the pleasure of making the presentation of the Gold Medal for the Novel to Eudora Welty on May 17, 1972, the date on which Miss Welty was also inducted into the Academy as well.