Tony Kushner To Receive Chicago Tribune's 2009 Literary Prize For Lifetime Achievement

Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning playwright Tony Kushner will receive the 2009 Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for lifetime achievement. The recognition will be presented November 8th during a special event at Symphony Center, as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival.

"We are delighted and honored to recognize Tony Kushner's extraordinary artistic achievements with this year's Tribune Literary Prize," Tribune editor Gerould Kern said. "Kushner joins a distinguished group to receive this award, including Arthur Miller, Tom Wolfe, August Wilson, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, E.L. Doctorow and David McCullough. Tony Kushner adds a new, vital dimension to that extraordinary list. We greatly appreciate Kushner's brilliance as a playwright. We also honor his contribution to the world through his public, and very passionate, role as a champion of ideas."

Born in New York City in 1956 and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Kushner is best known for his two-part epic, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. His other plays include A Bright Room Called Day; Slavs!; Hydriotaphia; Homebody/Kabul; and Caroline, or Change, a musical for which he wrote book and lyrics, with music by composer Jeanine Tesori. His most recent play, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures, premiered at the Guthrie Theater's recent Tony Kushner Celebration. Kushner has translated and adapted Pierre Corneille's The Illusion, S.Y. Ansky's The Dybbuk, Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Sezuan and Mother Courage and Her Children; and the English-language libretto for the children's opera Brundibár by Hans Krasa. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols' film of Angels in America, and Steven Spielberg's Munich. His books include But the Giraffe, a Curtain Raising, and Brundibar: the Libretto, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; The Art of Maurice Sendak, 1980 to the Present; and Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon.

Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, an Oscar nomination, an Arts Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Laura Pels Award for a Mid-Career Playwright, a Spirit of Justice Award from the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, and a Cultural Achievement Award from The National Foundation for Jewish Culture, among many others. Most recently, Caroline, or Change, produced in the autumn of 2006 at the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, received the Evening Standard Award, the London Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Olivier Award for Best Musical. In September 2008, Tony Kushner became the first recipient of the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, the largest theater award in the US. He is the subject of a documentary film, Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, made by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Freida Lee Mock. He is currently working on a screenplay about Abraham Lincoln. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.

For more information, visit www.chfestival.org.