Pulitzer-prize-winning novelist Anne Tyler is to receive the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence when she appears at the Oxford Literary Festival.

This is a very rare opportunity to see and hear the hugely popular US author on her first official visit to the UK. Tyler is flying over from the US specially to talk to The Sunday Times  chief fiction reviewer Peter Kemp about her new novel, The Beginner’s Goodbye, due to be published in April, and to accept the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence from the newspaper’s literary editor Andrew Holgate.

The Beginner’s Goodbye is a story about love and marriage and about two people so close they cannot be separated by death. Dorothy dies in an accident, leaving Aaron bereft. He keeps himself busy working for the family publishing firm, and then Dorothy starts to appear in the strangest places, at first for a short while, and then for longer. They talk and then they argue.

Tyler lives in Baltimore, where her novels are set. Her works include the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Breathing Lessons and a series of bestsellers, including The Accidental Tourist, Saint Maybe, Back When We Were Grown-ups, The Amateur Marriage, Digging to America and Noah’s Compass. She has twice been shortlisted for the Orange prize and was shortlisted for the International Man Booker in 2011.

Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times literary editor, said: ‘2012 is the 25th year of the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Since 1987, the prize has been given to a remarkable range of authors, from Anthony Burgess, Muriel Spark and Margaret Atwood to Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and John le Carre. I can think of no modern English-language author, though, who more deserves to be added to that list than Anne Tyler.

‘The apparent effortlessness of her prose is matched by her empathy for her characters, the depth of her human understanding and the consistency of her literary vision. Readers the world over treasure Anne Tyler for the profound way she seems to peer into their hearts, and we are thrilled that she has decided to make this rare visit the UK to accept the award.’

Anne Tyler said: ‘I am surprised and delighted by the news of this award.  I know what a great honour it is, and what good company I’m keeping; the list of those who have received it before me is dazzling.’

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