Winner

The 2011 PEN/Nora Magid Award went to Brigid Hughes, Founding Editor of A Public Space.

The PEN/Nora Magid Award, established in 1993, honors a magazine editor whose high literary standards and taste have, throughout his or her career, contributed significantly to the excellence of the publication he or she edits. Candidates for the biennial $5,000 award include current editors-in-chief, literary editors, and “back-of-the-book” editors of serious general interest magazines, book reviews, or literary reviews and quarterlies, whose intellectual discernment and wide range of interests recall the late PEN member Nora Magid, who was for many years the literary editor of The Reporter.

2011 Judges

Lan Samantha Chang, Willing Davidson, Jane Smiley

From the Judges’ Citation

“With limited resources, Brigid Hughes puts out A Public Space, an expansive, ambitious, and elegant literary journal. It is rare to find a publication that so wonderfully balances design and content; the magazine looks striking, and the work inside is rich and surprising. Many journals are hermetic or parochial, but A Public Space regularly runs stories and essays from other countries and traditions that feel perfectly at home in APS’s capacious enterprise. Most notable is a collaboration with the Japanese magazine Monkey Business, whose annual English-language edition A Public Space now publishes. Brigid Hughes is to be commended for her commitment to quality literature and for her larger purpose, which is to send that literature far out into the world, and to see what comes back.”