Michael Cunningham Speaks About "Daily Miracle of Art" at 2008 Festival's Closing Event

Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, was awarded the Fairfax Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Literary Arts on Friday, September 26, the closing night of the 2008 Fall for the Book festival. Cunningham's remarks spoke both to the roles and responsibilities of the writer and to the close relationship that readers have with the books that they treasure.

"In its ability to render the world with idiosyncratic but utterly unsentimental accuracy, a good book resembles a close friend or a lover," said Cunningham. "Like a friend or lover, a book should expand our powers of empathy, should enlarge the world around us and at the same time make us feel more at home in it, because someone we know and love is seeing and feeling and smelling and hearing it along with us, and their experiences of it links up with and enhances our own."

Cunningham's remarks echoed the types of connections that Fall for the Book each year hopes to encourage between readers and great literature and underscored the success of the 2008 festival, which introduced thousands of those readers to some of the nation's and the world's finest writers and scholars.

"The 10th annual Fall for the Book was a resounding success," said festival director William Miller. "Over the week, we welcomed more than 10,000 people to events at Mason's campus and throughout the region."

2008 marked a new direction for Fall for the Book, broadening the festival's geographical reach by partnering with libraries, organizations and business to offer events at 30 locations in a dozen localities throughout Northern Virginia, D.C. and Maryland. These additional programs helped Fall for the Book make good on its promise of "bringing the rock stars of writing to your backyard" and brought thousands of additional readers to the festival.

Special thanks go out to all of Fall for the Book's sponsors and partners and to both the festival's staff and its many volunteers, whose boundless energy and long hours helped make 2008 a milestone and unforgettable year.

Photo by Laura Foltz.