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PEN New England Presents...
"The Henry David Thoreau Prize"
for Literary Excellence in Nature Writing
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Gretel Ehrlich to Receive Thoreau Prize
7:00 p.m., Thursday, May 6, 2010
Geological Lecture
Hall
24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA
PEN New England will present this year's
prize to author Gretel Ehrlich
in recognition of her exceptional
talents as a nature writer who so artfully expresses the grandeur and
loneliness of natural settings. Ms. Ehrlich will
speak on the subject of "Writing About Nature" and, after her talk and
questions
from the audience, she will be presented with the Thoreau Prize. Reception follows in the Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford Street...
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Gretel Ehrlich
was born on a horse ranch near Santa Barbara, California and was educated at
Bennington College and UCLA film school.
After filming on a 250,000 acre sheep and cattle ranch in northern Wyoming,
Ehrlich published THE SOLACE OF OPEN SPACES. Annie Dillard wrote of the book: "Wyoming has found its
Whitman." The American Academy of
Arts and Letters awarded her the Harold D. Vurcell Award for Distinguished
Prose. The Chicago Tribune called
her next novel, HEART MOUNTAIN,
"absolutely dazzling". Set in
Wyoming during World War II, it is a portrait of a ranching community suddenly
invaded by an internment camp for Japanese Americans.
In 1991 Ehrlich
was hit by lightning while taking a walk on her ranch. She wrote of the experience in her
nationally bestselling memoir, A MATCH TO THE HEART. In 1993, she went to the foothills of the Himalayas in
western China. Intending to write a book on the four sacred Buddhist mountains in China,
she was so appalled by the stripping away of culture and humanity during the
Cultural Revolution, that she found herself writing something altogether
different. Ehrlich said QUESTIONS OF HEAVEN was "a lament for a 5000 year old
culture that has suffered almost complete extinction... almost, but not quite."
That same year,
Ehrlich began traveling north to Greenland, "I wanted to get above treeline, to see nothing but
horizons." Once there, she fell in
love with the Inuit people and traveled with subsistence hunters by dogsled for
months at a time out on the sea ice. "Greenland was a Siren singing me back. I could not stay away." Eight years later she published THIS COLD HEAVEN: Seven
Seasons in Greenland, of
which Tom McGuane wrote: "Combining timidity, foolhardiness, tenacity,
erudition, and poetry, Ehrlich's is a superb voice for the miracle of
Greenland." Ehrlich
divides her
time between California and Wyoming.
Just published, IN THE EMPIRE OF ICE:
Encounters in a Changing Landscape.
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PEN
(Poets/Playwrights,
Essayists/Editors, Novelists) New England is an organization of
published authors, aspiring writers, and all who
love the written word. Our mission is to advance a culture of
literature in New England
and defend free expression everywhere. PEN New England is a branch of PEN
American Center, and part of International
PEN, the
oldest international literary organization and also the oldest human
rights organization in the world. Visit us online at www.pen-ne.org
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