The US National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards, awarded its 2011 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to John Ashbery in recognition of his outstanding achievements as a twentieth-century poet. Previous recipients of the award include Toni Morrison, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gore Vidal, and Tom Wolf. To find out more about the National Book Foundation and the National Book Awards, please click here. Ashbery is published in the UK by Carcanet Press.

John Ashbery already has a string of accolades to his name, including The Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, all of which were garnered by his 1976 collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. To find out more about John Ashbery and his collections, and to order books with this month's special 20% discount, please click here.