He received honorary degrees from many universities including Oxford and Yale and was awarded an honorary KBE in 1989 for his outstanding services to music in Britain, where he made his home starting in 1972. In 1992 he received the Hans von Bülow Medal from the Berlin Philharmonic and was granted an honorary membership in the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in December 1998. In 2001 he was granted the Lifetime Achievement Award at both the MIDEM Cannes Classical Awards and the Edison Awards in Holland, as well as the prestigious "Beethoven Ring" from the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna. He has received the Leonie Sonning Prize, the Robert Schumann Prize, the 2002 South Bank Show Classical Music Award, as well as the 2004 Ernst von Siemens Prize, the 2007 "A Life for Music" prize in Venice, the 2008 Karajan Prize, the 2009 Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo and the 2010 Gramophone Lifetime Achievement Award.
Besides music, literature was Alfred Brendel's foremost interest and second occupation. He published two books of essays, Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts and Music Sounded Out, the latter of which was awarded the 1990 Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award for writing. A volume of collected essays, Alfred Brendel on Music, came out in January 2001 to mark his 70th birthday. There are also three German collections of poems, two of which are available in English: One Finger Too Many and Cursing Bagels, which appeared in the Faber Poetry Series. A bilingual edition of collected poems (Playing the Human Game, Phaidon Press 2010) is widely available, and a book of conversations with Martin Meyer, Ausgerechnet ich, was published in 2001, its American version (2002) bearing the title Me, of All People.
Alfred Brendel regularly gave lectures, poetry readings and masterclasses at the festivals of Salzburg and Verbier, the Vienna Musikverein and Konzerthaus, Wigmore Hall in London, and at the universities and concert halls of major German and European cities. He taught at the Cité de la Musique in Paris, and as guest professor in Cambridge. His North American activities included masterclasses at the Juilliard School and the New England Conservatory, and lectures at New York University, Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, the Royal Conservatory in Toronto, and for the Schubert Club in St. Paul, the Club Musical in Quebec, and the Vancouver Recital Society.
