Though he’s about to receive a lifetime achievement award, Evanston author Scott Turow says he still has a lot of achieving left to do.
“In general terms, I am as productive as I’ve always been. I write every day for quite a bit of the day,” said Turow, 74. “I’m trying to finish a draft of a novel, and a five-hour writing day in my experience, that’s a pretty full day of work. And when I’m grinding, which is what I’m doing now, it’s what I hope to achieve.”
Turow is being awarded with the Fuller Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame this week.
“I’m very pleased and really and truly deeply honored by this award,” he said.
“I guess I’m focused on the fact that it’s a lifetime achievement award. I don’t think they give you those when you’re young,” said Turow, who grew up in West Rogers Park before moving north with his family and attending New Trier High School.
The award was inspired by the literary contributions of Henry Blake Fuller, one of Chicago’s earliest novelists and author of “The Cliff-Dwellers.”
The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame only inducts historical writers into the Hall of Fame, and so the Fuller was created as a way to acknowledge the city’s greatest living writers.
The Oct. 5 award ceremony honoring Turow begins at 5 p.m. at the Harold Washington Library and is free and open to the public.
The best-selling author offered a bit of advice to anyone looking to get into a creative field.
“To all young people who want to know how to succeed in the arts, I always say hard work and talent are essential, but so is persistence,” he said.
Turow was working as an English professor at Stanford University — with three unpublished novels under his belt — when an idea he pitched to his literary agent about writing a non-fiction book about attending law school resulted in an actual contract to write the book.
“I wasn’t cut out to be an English professor. Going to law school was the great break of my literary career,” said Turow, who attended Harvard Law School and wrote a book about his first year called “One L.”
He later served as a federal prosecutor in Chicago, where he took on, among other things, high-profile corruption cases. After leaving that job he went into private practice and continued writing. In 1987, his breakthrough fiction novel “Presumed Innocent” was published — the first in a number of legal thrillers in which the fictional Kindle County is a stand-in for Cook County.
There’s one major difference these days that allows him to focus more on writing.
“I don’t attempt, for the most part, to practice law any more,” he said, noting he has one remaining legal case that has a familial connection.
He can write on planes and trains — like the one he used to take north from his law office in the Loop. He attributes the skill to being trained in high school as a journalism student.
“A reporter has to write anywhere, and I’ve always carried that over to my creative endeavors,” he said.
“Chicago has always been my literary homeland.”
