Julia Alvarez will receive the 2026 Lifetime of Excellence in Fiction Award, an honor bestowed by the Center for Fiction “to writers and luminaries who have significantly influenced our culture and perspective,” the center announced on Wednesday. The award will be presented in New York City on December 8.
The Weybridge writer has penned eight novels, three nonfiction books, 12 books for children and young adults, and five collections of poetry — including Visitations, released in April.
“With her astonishing 1991 debut, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Julia Alvarez announced herself as a writer who could not be ignored, giving voice to the Dominican-American experience with a clarity that commands attention,” Nina von Moltke, the Center for Fiction’s board chair, said in the news release announcing the award. “In the decades since, she has never confined herself to one shelf or one audience … Few writers have spoken so fully across generations, languages, and cultures.”
Born in New York City in 1950, and raised in the Dominican Republic until she was 10 years old, Alvarez has spent most of her literary career in the United States. She is best known for her novels, which include In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo!, In the Name of Salomé, Saving the World, Afterlife and The Cemetery of Untold Stories.
Alvarez has taught and mentored writers in schools and communities and, until 2016, was a longtime writer-in-residence at Middlebury College. “Julia Alvarez has been a beacon for so many of us for so long that it’s hard to imagine a literary world without her,” writer and novelist Edwidge Danticat said in the news release. “In the range, depth, and nuance of her work, she has opened my eyes as both a reader and a writer. Her voice always seems to arrive when it’s most needed.”
Founded in 1821, the Center for Fiction is a literary nonprofit in Brooklyn that supports readers and writers of all ages and histories, builds community through fiction, and offers programming for local and national audiences.
“It’s gratifying to be so fully welcomed by The Center for Fiction, a place that centers storytelling as a true meeting place for all of us,” Alvarez said in the news release. “The Center affirms what I knew early on, as a young girl, reciting poetry, long before I came into English and dreamed of becoming a writer. The stories I heard, the poems I recited awakened something big inside me; they stirred the mystery. I wanted to be in the presence of that wonder. I soon realized it was contagious and by writing I could share it
with others. The Center for Fiction also traffics in this wonder.”
Alvarez will be honored during the Center for Fiction’s Annual Awards Benefit at Cipriani 25 Broadway, an opulent, historic venue in lower Manhattan. Previous recipients of the Lifetime of Excellence in Fiction Award include Haruki Murakami, Patrick Chamoiseau, Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, Kazuo Ishiguro and Toni Morrison.