Galassi Wins Maxwell E. Perkins Award

By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 8/20/2008 7:33:00 AM

The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction has selected Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, as the recipient of its 2008 Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction. The award—recognizing an editor, publisher or agent who, over the course of his or her career, has discovered, nurtured and championed writers of fiction in the U.S.—will be presented at the Library’s December 1 annual dinner in New York City.

Galassi joined FSG as v-p and executive editor in 1986; he was named president in 2002. Among the authors he has worked with at the house are Michael Cunningham, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Thomas L. Friedman, Louise Glück, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, Denis Johnson, Jamaica Kincaid, William Langewiesche, Alice McDermott, Marilynne Robinson, Susan Sontag, Calvin Trillin, Mario Vargas Llosa, Scott Turow and Tom Wolfe. His authors have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and other honors.

Peter Ginna, president of the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction, said, “We’re delighted to honor Jonathan Galassi with this year’s Perkins Award. As both an editor and a publisher he has supported and shaped the work of a dazzling array of writers, carrying on the tradition exemplified so well by Maxwell Perkins.”