History

Photograph courtesy of the Heinz family

Hawthornden Foundation represents the vision and the legacy of its founder, Drue Heinz (1915-2018). She founded Hawthornden Literary Retreat as a charity in 1982, now known as Hawthornden Foundation. For much of her long life, she devoted her energy and determination to the promotion of literary art. She was the publisher of The Paris Review from 1993 to 2007 – her own interview with Ted Hughes appeared in the Spring 1995 issue. In 1981, she founded the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, administered by the University of Pittsburgh Press specifically to support writers of novellas and short stories. In 1971, with Daniel Halpern, she co-founded Ecco Press, which specialized in overlooked or forgotten titles and published the literary quarterly Antaeus until 1994. In 1991, she sponsored the Monday Night Lectures in Pittsburgh under the auspices of Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures to bring the works of new authors to new audiences. In 1997, she endowed the Drue Heinz Professorship of American Literature at Oxford. The Hawthornden Prize, one of Britain's oldest literary prizes, originally founded by Alice Warrender in 1919, was revived with her support in 1987 and is now administered by Hawthornden Foundation. Hawthornden Foundation has continued the work of its founder and expanded its residencies to include its sixty-acre property on Lake Como in Italy, called Casa Ecco, and a new property in Brooklyn, New York called Hawthornden Brooklyn.