PEN American Center’s 2011 award winners
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PEN American Center, the largest branch of the international literary and human rights organization, announced the winners of its 2011 awards Wednesday. The awards, which honor writing, translation and editing, total almost $150,000 and will be presented at a ceremony in New York City on Oct. 12. ‘PEN’s literary awards program is at the heart of what we do,’ President Anthony Appiah said in a statement.
The list of the 2011 PEN award winners follows; runners-up are after the jump.
Two authors will share the $25,000 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for fiction: Susanna Daniel for ‘Stiltsville’ and Danielle Evans for ‘Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self’
The first PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award goes to Siddhartha Mukherjee for ‘The Emperor of All Maladies,’ a biography of cancer.
The PEN/W.G. Sebald Award for a fiction writer who has published at least three significant works of literary fiction, with an award of $10,000, will be given to Aleksander Hemon.
The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith award for nonfiction $10,000, awarded biennially, goes to Robert Perkinson for ‘Texas Tough: the Rise of America’s Prison Empire.’
The PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Awards are $7,500 each. One for Master American Dramatist will go to David Henry Hwang; the award for an American Playwright in Mid-Career will go to Marcus Gardley.
The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay was revived after a five-year hiatus. Mark Slouka will receive $5,000 for ‘Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations.’
The PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing, with a $5,000 award, goes to Roger Angell. The PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, also $5,000, will go to George Dohrmann for ‘Play Their Hearts Out.’
The PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, with a $5,000 prize, goes to Stacy Schiff for ‘Cleopatra: A Life.’
The PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a prize of $5,000, to Ishion Hutchinson for ‘Far District.’
The PEN/Nora Magid Award is presented to a magazine editor, a prize of $5,000, for literary excellence; it will go to Brigid Hughes, founding editor of A Public Space.
The PEN Open Book Award, $5,000 for an exceptional work of literature by an author of color, will go to Manu Joseph for ‘Serious Men.’
The PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship presents $5,000 to an author of children’s or young-adult fiction who has published at least two books and is in need of monetary support to complete a manuscript. It goes to Lucy Frank for her novel in verse, ‘Two Girls Staring at the Ceiling.’
The PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, an award of $3,000, goes to Khaled Mattawa for ‘Adonis: Selected Poems.’
The PEN Translation Prize, an award of $3,000, goes to Ibrahim Muhawi for ‘Journal of an Ordinary Grief’ by Mahmoud Darwish.
The PEN Translation Fund will make 11 grants of $3,000 each to support the translation of book-length works into English: Amiri Ayanna for ‘The St. Katharinental Sister Book: Lives of the Sisters of the Dominican Convent at Diessenhofen’ (from middle high German); Neil Blackadder for ‘The Test (Good Simon Korach),’ a play by Swiss dramatist and novelist Lukas Bärfuss (from German); Clarissa Botsford for ‘Sworn Virgin,’ a novel by Albanian writer and filmmaker Elvira Dones (from Italian); Steve Bradbury for ‘Salsa,’ a collection of poems by Taiwanese poet Hsia Yü (from Chinese); Annmarie S. Drury for a collection of poems by Tanzanian poet Euphrase Kezilahabi (from Swahili); Diane Nemec Ignashev for ‘Paranoia,’ a novel by Belarusian author Viktor Martinovich (from Russian); Chenxin Jiang for ‘Memories of the Cowshed,’ a memoir by Chinese author Ji Xianlin (from Chinese); Hilary B. Kaplan for ‘Rilke Shake,’ a collection of poetry by Brazilian writer Angélica Freitas (from Portuguese); Catherine Schelbert for ‘Flametti, or the Dandyism of the Poor,’ a novel by German writer Hugo Ball (from German); Joel Streicker for ‘Birds in the Mouth,’ a collection of short stories by Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin (from Spanish); and Sarah L. Thomas for ‘Turnaround,’ a literary thriller by Spanish writer Mar Goméz Glez (from Spanish).
The inaugural PEN Emerging Writers Awards will present $1,660 each to upcoming writers who have been published in literary journals and have not yet published a book: in fiction, Smith Henderson; nonfiction, David Stuart MacLean; and in poetry, Adam Day.
Runners-up in their categories:
PEN/Robert W. Bingham runner up: Teddy Wayne, ‘Kapitoil.’
PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing runner-up: David Abram, ‘Becoming Animal.’
PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith award for nonfiction runners up: John W. Dower, ‘Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq’ and Isabel Wilkerson, ‘The Warmth of Other Suns.’
The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay runners up: Elif Batuman, ‘The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them’ and Alex Ross, ‘Listen to This.’
The PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography runners up: Wendy Moffat, ‘A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster’ and Justin Spring’s ‘Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward.’
The PEN Open Book Award runner up: John Murillo, ‘Up Jump the Boogie.’
The PEN Award for Poetry in Translation runners up: Jonathan Galassi for ‘Canti’ by Giacomo Leopardi, Michael Hofmann, for ‘Angina Days’ by Gunter Eich and Charles Simic for ‘Oranges and Snow’ by Milan Djordjević.
The PEN Translation Prize runners up: David Bellos for ‘Hocus Bogus’ by Romain Gary, publishing as Émile Ajar, and also Malcolm C. Lyons with Ursula Lyons for ‘The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights.’
The PEN Emerging Writers Awards runners up: Elliott Holt in fiction, Chester Phillips in nonfiction and Brett Fletcher Lauer in poetry.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
