The selection of Ms. Talese as the recipient is the result of a careful process initiated by the Library this summer to ensure that the first Maxwell Perkins Award would set the standard for the future. Nominations were solicited from 130 individuals in the publishing field and we received over 50 nominations that included the very best editors, agents, and publishers working today.

On August 11th, 2005, a panel of distinguished editors, publishers, writers, and agents convened at the Mercantile Library of New York and unanimously voted to award the this first Maxwell E. Perkins Award to Ms. Talese, not only because of her impressive track record in discovering, nurturing, and championing writers of fiction over the course of her career, but also because among all those on this year's very impressive short list, she was felt to embody so well the values central to Max Perkins.

We hope you are as delighted as we are with the creation of this new award to honor those in the publishing field who nurture fiction writers and help to ensure that their work is championed in the United States.

Nan A. Talese is a Senior Vice President of Doubleday and the Publisher and Editorial Director of Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a trade book publishing imprint known for its literary excellence. Having began her publishing career at Random House, she subsequently joined Simon & Schuster as an editor, beginning her long editorial relationships with such authors as Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Barry Unsworth and Thomas Keneally, all winners of the prestigious Booker Prize. It was at Houghton Mifflin, which she joined in 1981 as Executive Editor, eventually becoming Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, that she began her association with Pat Conroy as editor of his novel, The Prince of Tides. She joined Doubleday as Senior Vice President in 1988, and two years later introduced her author-oriented imprint dedicated to the publication of a select list of quality fiction and nonfiction.

How fitting it is that Nan A. Talese should be the first-ever recipient of the Maxwell E. Perkins Award, named for such a towering giant of an American editor! ...I sometimes think of Nan as a daring troika driver, dashing through the snow just ahead of the wolves, with her authors piled on precariously behind. It's been an exhilarating ride, though with here and there a scream-worthy moment, as Nan has veered unexpectedly and dangerously around a corner. At more tranquil times I remember with fondness a favorite saying of Nan's: "Rise above it" - a phrase I inserted into my novel “The Blind Assassin” as a hidden tribute to her.
-Margaret Atwood

Twenty-seven years ago, Nan A. Talese flew out to the Midwest from New York in order to read a typescript of my first novel which I - in my youthful arrogance- had refused to send to her. Naturally, I have stayed with her ever since. She is the writer's editor par excellence. To be published by her is to have a tigress at your side - she is beguiling and ferocious in equal measure. She lives and breathes the books she believes in. She is also elegant beyond belief and a wonderful friend. She is the jewel in the crown of American publishing. How right it is that she should receive this recognition.
-Ian McEwan

Pat Conroy on Nan A. Talese

On November 8th, the first Annual Maxwell E. Perkins Award was given to Nan A. Talese in recognition of her role in supporting and nurturing writers of fiction throughout her career. Novelist Pat Conroy surprised Nan with an appearance at the dinner to praise her work. This is the speech he delivered that evening:

Let us now praise Nan Ahearn Talese on the night that she enters the history of American letters by her acceptance of the first Maxwell E. Perkins award for Lifetime Achievement as an editor. I have never met an American novelist who did not come to the publishing houses of New York City with the dream of having a literary destiny enfolded by an editor like Maxwell Perkins. Even today, he remains the gold standard and the high watermark in any discussion of the editor's cunning and wizardly art. The writers that Max Perkins edited-Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Lardner, Edmund Wilson, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings-the list seems endless-took up much of the golden time of my childhood when I fell blindly in love with the English language and dreamed of writing books that would be praised and edited by a man just like Maxwell Perkins and unlike my real life father in any way.

In 1972, I came to New York for the publication of my book, The Water is Wide. I was thrilled to discover that my agent, Julian Bach, rented his offices in the Scribner's building and on that first trip, Julian put in a phone call and I was then on a tour of Maxwell Perkins' office. Later that evening, in the Italianate garden behind his home in Turtle Bay, Julian showed me the house where Maxwell Perkins once lived. As a young writer, Maxwell Perkins was a magical, incantatory name to me and visiting his office and staring at his house on the same day was the equivalent to me of an audience with the pope and I fully expected a puff of white smoke to emerge from the papal windows high above me. That is how lucky my life has been-the literary gods steered my writing life toward the flagship of the HMS Nan Talese, the magnificent editor who shoulders her way into the history of American literature by receiving the first Maxwell Perkins award tonight. By honoring the incomparable Nan Talese, we are paying the deepest homage to the transcendent memory of Max Perkins himself.

If you know Nan Talese for even a short while, you understand that literature is both her religion and her reason for being and that writers like me feel privileged to sit beside her and let her turn our work into much better books than they were ever meant to be. Because writers are the most oversensitive, childish, insecure and hideous people to inhabit the earth, the editor's lot is never an easy one. Their stomachs are ulcerous, their hearts flash-frozen, their bowels uncertain and their eyes grow milky with cataracts-all because of their daily communications with writers. Most of us would have become serial killers or founders of blood-sucking cults if we had failed to find an editor to publish our books. Nan, of course, thinks I am too hard on my brother and sister writers and she professes to kvell in their quick-witted, over articulate company. I would rather be thrown into a pool filled with mako sharks, Portuguese Man O' Wars, and schools of famished piranhas than into a room of writers. Nan adores her writers with all our flawed, egregious humanity raising the temperatures of every room we may enter, likes their companionship so much that she even leapt into the void itself and married one, the supremely gifted Gay Talese. Nan's favorite movie about the writing life is The March of the Penguins; mine is Jaws.

For years I have studied Nan Talese, trying to unlock the deep mysteries of what makes a great editor. To be a great editor in this mightiest of cities, you must sweep through the streets of New York as though you owned them all. Watch Nan Talese enter any room or gin joint in this town and watch her freeze that room into a delightful submission by her mere presence. In a church on Fifth Avenue, I watched her enter on a side aisle for a reading by Tom Cahill of his book How the Irish Saved Civilization. Gloriously dressed, she floated past statues of St. Jude and St. Francis, queen-like and serene in her black beret and sailing cape, and lent a majesty to both the event and the night. Sitting near the rear of the church, I watched the people assembled there asking each other the identity of that beautiful woman. When I first had dinner with Nan and Gay Talese, I had never dined with two people so impeccably and irresistibly dressed. Later, I learned that all their clothes were tailored by Englishmen who worked with the most delicate of materials-the foreskins of llamas, mink, and snow leopards.

So Nan possessed the beauty and the style and the presence to be a great editor. That was enough to get Nan a job as a copyeditor in this city and an apprenticeship with some of the most gifted male editors of her time. And when Nan started out, publishing was a boy's club and with my apologies about it. She learned the craft of editing and all of its steely requirements. To be a great editor you have to develop the diplomatic skills of U Thant and a lust for battle that could be admired by Genghis Khan. You had to master the arts of fighting for a writer you believed in and battle like a Serengeti lion for the territory you felt you had earned. Along the way you had to ingest the hardest lesson of publishing, that the books that became your sweetheart of a certain season had to earn their own way. One of the requirements of a great editor is the development of those sweet poisons that all assassins and grand inquisitors know in their bones. Sometimes you have to turn down the books of writers you love the best of all, friends you see at parties, the godmothers of your children, and even the writers who helped lift you up to the corner office, the one with the view of Central Park and the Hudson River.

Here is why I personally love Nan Talese. Twice in my life, I handed her novels that were over two thousand pages long. I say this with embarrassment and no pride. If Nan had shot and killed me in her office, I believe that no New York jury would have convicted her of anything but pest control. From my perspective now, it looks like an act of hostility and great unprofessionalism on my part. Nan did not see it that way. She drove into the heart of those books with an enthusiasm that astonishes me to this day. Coming up for air, Nan emerged with charts and maps and clues to unlock the labyrinth. She introduced me to the city of characters I had produced in my head and for the months we worked on those books I felt my intellect on fire, began to see the outline of the book I had wanted to write take its fierce shape, and lived as a prisoner in Nan Talese's head as she labored and worked her magic and handed me back a book I could publish without shame. The first novel we called The Prince of Tides. The next one we called Beach Music and it was such a mess, it felt more like a formless sea of language than a book. If an editor ever showed more courage or stamina or commitment to a writer's most incoherent and ill-formed ink, it was Nan Talese. My gratitude to her is eternal. Her intellect was firing on all cylinders, and she turned the two bloated oil tankers I shipped up to Doubleday into frigates that were seaworthy and you'd pay good money to board. Every writer who enters Nan Talese's office is offered the quiet gift of her genius. When she reads your work aloud, it sounds more beautiful than you ever thought it could sound. When Nan Talese reads the lifetime that she was born to edit, she is not reading-she is singing-she is singing the lone song of her own life, the life she was born to lead.

With the acceptance of this prize, Nan, you will enter the train where there is only one other passenger. I think it is just and fitting that a woman has won this first prize. You will be greeted in the club car by Maxwell Perkins himself. He will conduct himself as the impeccable gentleman he was. You both can talk forever about the writers you met and the books you loved. But when you enter that car, Nan, I want you to sweep down that aisle because no one can sweep into a room like you can and I want Max to get the full effect. And Nan, from a writer who loves you, please wear that cape and please, please, don't forget the beret.