Pearl S Buck awarded woman of the Year 2006

Washington, Oct 26: US First lady Laura Bush has been confered upon with Pearl S Buck Woman of the Year award for her active involvement in issues of national and global concern, specially education, health care and human rights.

She received the award early this week at a ceremony in Pennsylvania, at the home of the late Nobel Prize-winning author.

While accepting the award, she said Americans are continuing Buck's legacy of humanitarian efforts with such programmes as the US-Afghan Women's Council which provides Afghan women with jobs, the President's programmes to fight malaria, HIV/AIDS and other diseases. Educational programmes as the African Education Initiative, provides millions of textbooks for African school children and has trained more than 400,000 African teachers there, she added.

American author Pearl S. Buck wrote The Good Earth (1932), a novel set in China that won the Pulitzer Prize the same year. She won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1938, lived in East Asia for 40 years.

She died in 1973.

UNI