Vermont author Mosher awarded BCA's biggest prize

Burlington City Arts awarded its fourth-annual Herb Lockwood Prize on Friday afternoon to Howard Frank Mosher, the celebrated Vermont author who announced Sunday that he is in hospice care following a cancer diagnosis.

The award, which carries a $10,000 prize, is normally given by BCA in June, but the date was moved up following Mosher’s announcement on Facebook about his condition. He was presented with the award at his home in Irasburg with his wife, Phillis, and daughter, Annie, in attendance.

The Herb Lockwood Prize, which BCA calls the largest arts prize in Vermont, aims to reward “the pinnacle of arts leadership in Vermont by honoring the state’s most influential artists,” according to BCA. Past winners are filmmaker Nora Jacobson of Norwich, fine artist/typographer Claire Van Vliet of Newark and actor/theater director Steve Small of Middlebury.

Mosher’s novels, including “Disappearances,” “A Stranger in the Kingdom” and “Where the Rivers Flow North,” capture rural Vermont life in all its drama and eccentricities. Northeast Kingdom filmmaker Jay Craven has turned those novels, as well as Mosher’s “Northern Borders,” into movies starring actors such as Kris Kristofferson, Genevieve Bujold, Michael J. Fox, Rip Torn and Bruce Dern.

The Herb Lockwood Prize is the latest honor in a career that has also seen Mosher, 74, acknowledged with a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Award and the Vermont Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.

“His subject is always Vermont, but not in a postcard way,” according to a news release from BCA. “Rather, he brings rough and tumble hill folk to life, exposes racism and narrow mindedness, and finds generosity and humor in the most modest of places. He is the bard of the Northeast Kingdom, although in his books it is called Kingdom County.”

BCA noted that Mosher uses his blog to praise books by other Vermont writers and to celebrate small bookstores and publishers. “He has helped many a Vermont writer with words of encouragement, even those yet to be published,” according to the BCA news release. “Howard Frank Mosher is a Vermont treasure in the fullest sense of the word.”

The Herb Lockwood Prize is named in honor of a man who BCA called “an inspirational figure in the Burlington arts and music scene” in the 1980s. Lockwood died in a workplace accident in Burlington in 1987 at age 27. The award was founded by his brother, Burlington writer/photographer Todd R. Lockwood, who presented the honor Friday to Mosher.

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck .