PEN American Center has announced the winners of 18 literary awards, which will be presented Oct. 23 in New York City. The awards--fellowships, grants and prizes--range between $3,000 and $25,000 each and in total amount to nearly $175,000.
Here are the winners, with links to Star Tribune reviews, when available:
PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction:
"Good Kings Bad Kings," by Susan Nussbaum
PEN/Robert Bingham Award for First Fiction:
"Zazen," by Vanessa Veselka
Runner up: "Leaving the Atocha Station," by Ben Lerner (Coffee House Press)
PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction:
E.L. Doctorow.
PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award:
"The Information," by James Gleick
Runner up: "Moby-Duck," by Donovan Hohn.
PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation Awards for an American Playwright in Mid-Careerand a Master American Dramatist:
Christopher Durang (master dramatist) and Will Eno and Adam Rapp (mid-career playwrights)
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
"Arguably," by Christopher Hitchens
Runners up: "Alibis," by Andre Aciman, and "Lives and Letters," by Robert Gottlieb
PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting
"Bottom of the 33rd," by Dan Barry
Runners-up: "Room for Improvement," by John Casey; "56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports," by Kostya Kennedy; and "Raceball," by Rob Ruck
PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing
Dan Jenkins
PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
"Catherine the Great," by Robert K. Massie
Runner up: "A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother," by Janny Scott
PEN Open Book Award
"The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India," by Siddhartha Deb
Runners up:
"Water Puppets," by Quan Barry, and "Oil on Water," by Helon Habila
PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship
Sarah Dooley
PEN/Steven Kroll Award Honoring the Author of an Illustrated Children's Book
"Never Forgotten," by Patricia C. McKissack
PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry
Toi Derricotte
PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
"Negro Marfil/Ivory Black," by Myriam Moscona, translated by Jen Hofer
PEN/Edward and Lily Tuck Award for Paraguayan Literature
"Versos de amor y de locura," by Delfina Acosta
PEN Translation prize
"Stone Upon Stone," by Wieslaw Mysliwski, translated by Bill Johnston
PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation
Margaret Sayers Peden