 Besides honors , memberships , and postings to prestigious organizations world @-@ wide , Edward Said was awarded some twenty honorary university degrees in the course of his professional life as an academic , critic , and Man of Letters . Among the honors bestowed to him was the Bowdoin Prize by Harvard University . He twice received the Lionel Trilling Book Award ; the first occasion was the inaugural bestowing of said literary award in 1976 , for Beginnings : Intention and Method ( 1974 ) . He also received the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association , and was awarded the inaugural Spinoza Lens Prize . In 2001 , Said was awarded the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement , and in 2002 , he received the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord . He was the first U.S. citizen to receive the Sultan Owais Prize ( for Cultural & Scientific Achievements , 1996 – 1997 ) . The autobiography Out of Place ( 1999 ) was bestowed three awards , the 1999 New Yorker Book Award for Non @-@ Fiction ; the 2000 Anisfield @-@ Wolf Book Award for Non @-@ Fiction ; and the Morton <unk> Zabel Award in Literature . 
