Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced that Louise Erdrich will receive the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, to be awarded during the 2015 Library of Congress National Book Festival on Saturday, September 5, at Washington, DC’s Walter E. Washington Convention Center. The award is given for both artistic merit and originality of thought and imagination, which Erdrich has demonstrated in novels ranging from her debut, Love Medicine, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, to The Plague of Doves, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner, to 2012’s The Round House, winner of the National Book Award.

Erdrich’s novels successfully highlight the struggles of Native and mixed-race Americans in a harsh and often unaccepting contemporary world, frequently heightening the effect with language that is particularly lush and richly adorned. Says Billington, “Throughout a remarkable string of virtuosic novels, Louise Erdrich has portrayed her fellow Native Americans as no contemporary American novelist ever has, exploring—in intimate and fearless ways—the myriad cultural challenges that indigenous and mixed-race Americans face….And yet, for all the bracing originality of her work, her fiction is deeply rooted in the American literary tradition.”

Erdrich is the third winner of the award, previously given to Don DeLillo in 2013 and E.L. Doctorow in 2014. The award grew out of the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for fiction, itself inspired by the Library’s honoring Herman Wouk with a lifetime achievement award in 2008. Recipients of the Creative Achievement award include John Grisham (2009), Isabel Allende (2010), Toni Morrison (2011) and Philip Roth (2012). In choosing Erdrich for the current award, Billington drew on the recommendation of a panel of distinguished authors and prominent literary critics.