NEW YORK (AP) — Author Cynthia Ozick is sitting for what she calls a "mid-career" interview, notable not only because she has just won two lifetime achievement awards, but because only recently did she accept that she has a "career".

"I felt it was the wrong word — it was a power word," Ozick, who turned 80 this month, says in her improbably girlish voice. "I had this notion, I still do, I guess, that the power is in the mind and in the writing."

Few authors are so self-evidently bookish, in appearance (bangs, large glasses), and in subject matter, whether passionate essays about such heroes as Henry James and Saul Bellow, or fictional works about authors such as "The Messiah of Stockholm" and the title story of her new collection, "Dictation."

She is wise to the drawing rooms of James and to the streets of Bellow, and her devotion — and contributions — to literary history have been certified by panels for two lifetime honours: The $5,000 PEN/Malamud prize for short fiction, and the $20,000 PEN/Nabokov award for "enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship."

The awards were administered by separate entities, but they agreed to announce their winners at the same time this week after learning from The Associated Press that each had given a prize to Ozick.

"A prodigious imagination, a relentless intellect, an endless appetite for investigation and truth telling: All of these we have come to expect from her work," PEN/Nabokov judges Mary Gordon, Brian Boyd and Richard Price wrote in their citation.

"No American writer working today is as close in soul and style to Bernard Malamud as Cynthia Ozick," PEN/Malamud judge Alan Cheuse wrote, "and no American writer working today is more distinctive in everything she does on the page."

Peter Ho Davies, whose books include "Equal Love," was named a co-winner of the Malamud prize.

Ozick spoke recently in a second floor conference room at the public library near her house in New Rochelle. (Her husband, Bernard Hallote, was one floor below, returning some books.)

If this interview is "mid-career," then Ozick could be described as coming out of a mid-career crisis.

She rarely appears on best-seller lists, but she has had an enviable career.

Ozick has published more than a dozen highly praised books.

She has won the National Book Critics Circle prize for her essay collection, "Quarrel & Quandary," and written one of the most anthologised stories of the past 30 years, "The Shawl," her terrifying tale about a mother and baby in a concentration camp.

But Ozick, who has also received a Rea Award for short story excellence, thinks as much about the books she didn't publish, and about the people who haven't read her.

A native of New York City, she recalls being haunted as a teenager by "The Beast in the Jungle," James' classic story of a man who spends his life waiting, in vain, for his life to begin. She was certain she would have the same fate.

"I think I feel a little more recognition now," she says, "I think most of my life I have not felt recognised."

Although by high school she possessed a "mature" prose style, her first novel, "Trust," was not published until her late 30s. Before that, she worked on a Jamesian novel, "Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love," for seven stubborn years and abandoned it.

She needed another seven years to complete "Trust".

Meanwhile, such (slightly) younger writers as Philip Roth and John Updike had been in print since their mid-20s.

"I was boiling in envy," she says. "I couldn't get going. I couldn't get started."

"A lot of it was my own fault, which is I should have done what younger writers today do — go out in the world and write for magazines. Don't have this enclosed dream that you're going to be the old Henry James when you're young," she says.

Ozick sees herself as an innocent who worried for too long about the art at the expense of thinking about the business.

In the past few years, she has switched publishers, from Alfred A. Knopf to Houghton Mifflin, agencies (from Raines and Raines to Melanie Jackson) and in 2004 went on her first book tour.

"First of all, I think I made a mistake in not taking that (sales) too seriously," she says. "I think it is serious to have good sales.

"As I learned belatedly, the more you sell, the more publishers pay attention to you, and it took me a very long time to figure that out because I never thought that way."

Her audience did increase for her first Houghton Mifflin novel, "Heir to the Glimmering World," released in 2004.

According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of sales, "Glimmering World" sold more than 30,000 copies, much better than her final fiction work for Knopf, "The Puttermesser Papers."

But her sales have changed far more than Ozick has.

Asked if she ever had, or might attempt a deliberately commercial story, the author says no and mentions literary master Ralph Limbert, whose work only became more exquisite, and more obscure, the harder he tried to make it popular.

Limbert himself exists only in fiction, in a short story called "The Next Time".