THE GUARDIAN: For a musician who virtually dropped out of public life for almost two decades, Patti Smith has become remarkably ubiquitous. Barely a month passes without her being graced with a new award or feted at a Manhattan cultural event. The latest accolade for the 65-year-old “godmother of punk” was the National Book Award for non-fiction, which she won on Wednesday night for her memoir of her bohemian days in the Chelsea Hotel with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. It marked the fulfilment of Smith’s lifelong dream to be a writer, or as she put it at the awards ceremony at Scribner’s bookstore in New York, “of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf”. MORE
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