Ingersoll Prizes to Paz, Pieper

CHICAGO — Mexican author Octavio Paz and German philosopher Josef Pieper have been awarded the 1987 Ingersoll Prizes, the Ingersoll Foundation announced.

Paz will receive the T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing and Pieper will receive the Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters.

The awards, which will be awarded here Nov. 5 and carry a cash prize of $15,000 each, recognize authors of lasting influence whose works affirm the moral principles of Western civilization.

Paz, born in 1914 in Mexico City, is known for his poetry and non-fiction. His works include “Eagle or Sun?” a collection of prose poems published in 1951, “Sunstone” (1957) and “Blanco” (1967).

Pieper was born in 1904 in Elte, in what is now West Germany. He is best known as a scholar on St. Thomas Aquinas and medieval philosophy and his best known book in the United States is “Leisure: the Basis of Culture.”