Shortlists announced: April 16
PEN Literary Awards Ceremony: June 8
PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction ($25,000): Awarded to an author whose debut work—a first novel or collection of short stories published in 2014—represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise.
JUDGES:
Caroline Fraser was born in Seattle and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University in English and American literature. Formerly on the editorial staff of The New Yorker, she is the author of two nonfiction books, God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church and Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, Outside Magazine, and The London Review of Books, among other publications. She received a PEN Award for Best Young Writer and was a recipient of the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, awarded by PEN Northwest.
Katie Kitamura is a critic and novelist based in New York City. She is the author of The Longshot (2009) and Gone to the Forest (2012), both of which were finalists for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Kitamura has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, and Wired and is a regular contributor to Frieze.
Paul La Farge is the author of the novels The Artist of the Missing (1999), Haussmann, or the Distinction (2001), and Luminous Airplanes (2011), as well as The Facts of Winter (2005), a book of imaginary dreams. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Fence, and elsewhere. He was a 2013-14 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Victor LaValle is the author of Slapboxing with Jesus, a book of stories, and the novelsThe Ecstatic, Big Machine, and The Devil in Silver. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Shirley Jackson Award and the key to Southeast Queens. His writing has appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, New York Magazine, The Washington Post, and Bookforum, among others. He was raised in Queens, New York. He now lives in Washington Heights with his wife and children. He teaches at Columbia University.
PEN/FUSION Emerging Writers Prize ($10,000): Awarded to a promising young writer under the age of 35 for an unpublished work of nonfiction that addresses a global and/or multicultural issue.
JUDGES:
John Freeman is the author of The Tyranny of Email and How to Read a Novelist. The former president of the National Book Critics Circle and editor of Granta magazine, his work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. He now teaches writing at NYU and The New School. Starting in the fall of 2015, he will launch Freeman’s, a biannual literary journal and anthology which will be published by Grove Press. He edited his most recent book, Tales of Two Cities: The Best and Worst of Times in Today’s New York, in benefit of Housing Works. He lives in New York City.
Roxane Gay is the co-editor of PANK Magazine and author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State and Bad Feminist. Her pieces have been published in numerous anthologies and periodicals, including Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, TIME, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Salon, and many others. Her memoir Hunger, will be published in 2016.
Cristina Henríquez is the author of three books, as well as numerous fiction and non-fiction pieces published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Glimmer Train, The American Scholar, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, The Oxford American, Preservation and AGNI along with the anthology This Is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers. She was featured in Virginia Quarterly Review as one of “Fiction’s New Luminaries,” and is a recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award. Her newest work, The Book of Unknown Americans, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2014. Photo Credit: Michael Lionstar
PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction ($10,000): For a distinguished book of general nonfiction published in 2013 or 2014.
JUDGES:
Andrew Blechman is an award-winning journalist who reported for the Los Angeles Times and The Des Moines Register. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic and Smithsonian magazines, The New York Times, and the International Herald Tribune, among others. His books, Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World’s most Revered and Reviled Bird and Leisureville: Adventures in a World Without Children (both Grove Atlantic) were widely lauded, and released in paperback in the United States and abroad. Blechman is the Managing Editor of Orion Magazine in Massachusetts.
Paul Elie is the author of two books: The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003) and Reinventing Bach (2012). The Life You Save May Be Your Own was awarded the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for First Nonfiction in 2004, and both books were National Book Critics Circle Award finalists. For many years an editor with FSG, Elie is now a senior fellow with Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and directs the American Pilgrimage Project, a university partnership with StoryCorps. He writes for The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Commonweal, and other periodicals.
Azadeh Moaveni is the author of Lipstick Jihad, Honeymoon in Tehran, and co-author, with Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebadi, of Iran Awakening. She reported from across the Middle East for a decade as a correspondent for TIME magazine, covered the Iraq War for the Los Angeles Times, and continues to write widely on Iran and the region for numerous publications. She reviews books for the Financial Times and lectures in journalism at Kingston University in London. Photo Credit: Mehrdad Daftari
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto‘s memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning, was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the winner of the Grub Street National Book Award in Nonfiction. Her first novel, Why She Left Us, won an American Book Award in 2000. She is also a recipient of the U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including the L.A. Times and Salon. She was Associate Editor of The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings About New York City, and teaches in the MFA program for creative writing at Goddard College.
Paul Reyes is Deputy Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review. Before joining VQR, he was an editor at The Oxford American. His writing has appeared in VQR, The Oxford American, Harper’s, The New York Times, Mother Jones, and Details. In 2009, Reyes was awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship in nonfiction and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. He is the author of Exiles in Eden: Life Among the Ruins of Florida’s Great Recession (Holt, 2010).
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($10,000): For a book of essays published in 2014 that exemplifies the dignity and esteem that the essay form imparts to literature.
JUDGES:
Diane Johnson is a novelist and essayist. A two-time finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in three different genres—essay, biography, and fiction, she is the co-author with Stanley Kubrick of the screenplay for the now classic film The Shining. She is the author of Le Divorce, Lulu in Marrakech, Lying Low and other novels, and a 2014 memoir Flyover Lives. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and splits her time between San Francisco and Paris. Photo Credit: Alison Harris
Dahlia Lithwick is a senior editor at Slate, where she writes the columns “Supreme Court Dispatches” and “Jurisprudence.” Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Commentary, among other publications. She won a 2013 National Magazine Award for her columns on the Affordable Care Act, and has twice been awarded an Online Journalism Award for her legal commentary. Lithwick was the first online journalist invited to be on the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and has testified before Congress about access to justice in the era of the Roberts Court. She is currently working on a book about the four female justices of the US Supreme Court.
Vijay Seshadri is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, essayist, and critic. He is the author of Wild Kingdom (1996), James Laughlin Award recipient The Long Meadow (2003), and 3 Sections (2013). His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in A Public Space, AGNI, The Threepenny Review, and The Paris Review, among many other publications. Seshadri has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the NEA, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has worked as an editor at The New Yorker and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, where he founded and has directed the nonfiction writing program for the past decade.
Mark Slouka is an internationally recognized author of six books. Both his fiction and nonfiction have been translated into sixteen languages. His stories have twice been selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories, and his essays have appeared numerous times for Best American Essays. A contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine since 2001, his work also appears in Ploughshares, Orion Magazine, Bomb, The Paris Review, AGNI, and Granta. A Guggenheim and NEA fellowship recipient, he has taught literature and writing at Harvard, Columbia, and University of Chicago. He is the 2011 recipient of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for his collection of essays Nick of Time.
PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award ($10,000): For a book of literary nonfiction on the subject of the physical or biological sciences published in 2014.
JUDGES:
Sue Halpern is an award-winning author and long-time contributor to the New York Review of Books. She has published six books, including her most recent work A Dog Walks Into A Nursing Home, and has written extensively on science, technology and social issues for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone and many other publications. Halpern is Scholar-in-Residence at Middlebury College where she directs the Narrative Journalism Fellowship. She holds a doctorate from Oxford University and was a Guggenheim Fellow.
Marie Myung-Ok Lee is writing a novel about the future of medicine, forthcoming with Simon & Schuster. She teaches fiction at Columbia and has been a guest speaker at Yale Medical School and Columbia’s Narrative Medicine Program, and is a TEDMED Front Line Scholar. She writes for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon, The Nation, Slate, The Guardian and has been a judge for the National Book Awards. Photo Credit: Deborah Lopez
Carl Zimmer is a columnist at The New York Times, where he writes about science each week. He is the author of a dozen books, including Parasite Rex, Soul Made Flesh, and A Planet of Viruses. He writes regularly for magazines such as National Geographic and The Atlantic. Photo Credit: Ben Stechschulte
PEN Open Book Award ($5,000): For an exceptional book-length work of literature by an author of color published in 2014.
JUDGES:
R. Erica Doyle is a writer of Trinidadian descent from Brooklyn, NY. Her first collection of poetry, proxy (2013), was selected for a Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. Doyle’s work has been featured in the anthologies Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (2008) and Best American Poetry (2001), among others. Her honors include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Cave Canem, and an Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice Lesbian Writers Fund Award in Poetry.
W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South and Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey Into Mississippi’s Dark Past. Most recently, he was editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review at the University of Virginia.
Chinelo Okparanta was born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. She is the author of Happiness, Like Water. A finalist for the 2013 Caine Prize in African Writing and for the Etisalat Prize for Literature, she is also a 2014 O. Henry Award winner and a 2014 Lambda Literary Award winner for Lesbian Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and The Kenyon Review, among others. Photo Credit: Rolex/Bart Michiels
PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography ($5,000): For a distinguished biography published in 2014.
JUDGES:
Emily Bernard is the author of Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White (2012). Her first book, Remember Me to Harlem (2001), was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her essays have been published in several anthologies and journals, such as American Scholar, Oxford American Magazine, Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Non-Fiction. She has received fellowships from the Alphonse A. Fletcher Foundation, Yale University, Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the W. E. B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. She is a professor of English and critical race and ethnic studies at the University of Vermont. Photo Credit: Shayne Lynn
Nicholas Fox Weber is a cultural historian and Executive Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. He has written extensively about both Josef and Anni Albers and curated many major exhibitions and retrospectives dedicated to their work. He is a graduate of Columbia College and Yale University and author of fourteen books including Patron Saints, The Art of Babar, The Drawings of Josef Albers, The Clarks of Cooperstown, Balthus, Le Corbusier: A Life, and The Bauhaus Group.
Jon Meacham is the author of New York Times bestsellers Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (2012), American Gospel (2007) and Franklin and Winston (2004). Meacham received the Pulitzer Prize for American Lion, his bestselling 2008 biography of Andrew Jackson. Executive Editor and Executive Vice President of Random House, Meacham is a contributing editor of TIME, a former editor of Newsweek, and has written for The New York Times and The Washington Post, among other publications. A Fellow of the Society of American Historians, Meacham serves on the boards of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and of The McCallie School. Photo Credit: Gasper Tringale
PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000): Honoring a nonfiction book on the subject of sports published in 2014.
JUDGES:
Rich Cohen, a New York Times bestselling author, grew up on the North Shore of Chicago, where he died with the Cubs and was reborn with the Bears. He has written ten books and a host of magazine articles for, among others, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Vanity Fair, where he’s a contributing editor. Cohen has won the Great Lakes Book Award and the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, and his stories have been included in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and three sons, but is plotting his return to Chicagoland.
George Dohrmann is the rare sportswriter to have won a Pulitzer Prize. He earned journalism’s top honor in 2000 while at the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In 2000 he also joined Sports Illustrated, where his primary beat is investigative reporting. Dohrmann is the author of the book, Play Their Hearts Out (Random House, 2010), which won the 2011 PEN/ESPN Award for literary sports writing and was named the best sports book of the year by Amazon. He resides in Ashland, OR with his family.
Jonathan Mahler is a reporter and writer for The New York Times, and a former sports columnist for Bloomberg View. He is the author of the best-selling Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, the basis for the eight-part ESPN mini-series. He also wrote The Challenge, the winner of the 2009 Scribes Book Award, and Death Comes to Happy Valley. A longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine, his articles and essays have appeared in a number of collections, including Best American Sports Writing. He lives in New York.
PEN Translation Prize ($3,000): For a book-length translation of prose into English published in 2014.
JUDGES:
Heather Cleary’s translations include Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets (finalist, Best Translated Book Award 2012) and The Dark (nominee, National Translation Award 2013), and Poems to Read on a Streetcar, a selection of Oliverio Girondo’s poetry (New Directions 2014). The recipient of a PEN Translation Fund Grant for her work with Girondo, she is a founding editor of the digital, bilingual Buenos Aires Review and has written on literature in translation for The Quarterly Conversation and Words Without Borders, among other publications. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University.
Lucas Klein is a writer, translator, and editor whose work has appeared in Jacket, Rain Taxi, CLEAR, and PMLA, and from Fordham, Black Widow, and New Directions. Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong, his translation of poetry by Xi Chuan 西川 won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize and was shortlisted for the Best Translated Book Award in poetry. His translations of seminal contemporary poet Mang Ke 芒克 are forthcoming from Zephyr and Chinese University Press, and he is at work translating Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin 李商隱 (for more, see xichuanpoetry.com).
Tess Lewis’s translations from French and German include works by Peter Handke, Alois Hotschnig, Doron Rabinovici, Melinda Nadj Abonji, Pascal Bruckner, and Jean-Luc Benoziglio. She has been awarded translation grants from PEN USA and PEN UK, an NEA Translation Fellowship, a Max Geilinger Translation Award and the Austrian Cultural Forum’s 2015 Translation Prize. She also serves as an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review and writes essays on European Literature for numerous journals and newspapers. Since 2014, Ms. Lewis has curated Festival Neue Literature, New York City’s premiere annual festival of German language literature in English.
Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator and editor in New York City. Her translation of The Briefcase by Hiromi Kawakami was nominated for the 2012 Man Asian Literary Prize, and the UK edition (Strange Weather in Tokyo) was nominated for the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She has also translated works by Osamu Dazai and Fuminori Nakamura, among others. Photo Credit: Jonathan Armstrong for The Documentist.
PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000): For a book-length translation of poetry into English published in 2014.
JUDGE:
Ana Božičević is the author of Stars of the Night Commute (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010) and Rise in the Fall (Birds, LLC), a 2013 Lambda Literary Award Winner. Her translation of It Was Easy to Set the Snow on Fire by Zvonko Karanović will be published this spring by Phoneme Media. With Željko Mitić, Ana co-edited The Day Lady Gaga Died: an Anthology of NYC Poetry of the 21st Century (in Serbian, Peti talas/The Fifth Wave, 2011). She edited Diane di Prima’s lectures for Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she studies poetics. With Sophia Le Fraga, she teaches poetry at BHQFU in New York. Currently Ana is working on her third book, The Joy of Missing Out.
2015 CAREER ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS AND JUDGES
(The following PEN Awards will not have longlists or shortlists announced but are listed below to announce the participation of those authors who are judging the awards. The winners will be announced in May along with all of the winners for the book awards.)
PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Awards ($7,500 and $2,500): Three awards which honor a Master American Dramatist, American Playwright in Mid-Career, and Emerging American Playwright.
JUDGES:
Kathleen Chalfant is an American actress who works in the theatre, television and film. She was nominated for a Tony award for her work in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and won the Drama Desk and numerous other awards for her portrayal of Vivian Bearing in Margaret Edson’s play Wit. She is the recipient of 3 Obie awards and a Doctorate of Humane Letters from The Cooper Union as well as The Sidney Kingsley Award for her body of work. She is currently a member of the ensemble of The Affair on Showtime and plays the President of Hudson University on Law and Order: SVU. Film work includes Duplicity, Five Corners, Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight and the recently released Isn’t it Delicious. She is also a member of the faculty of The New School for Dramateaching in the MFA program in acting.
Ellen McLaughlin‘s plays include: Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Tongue of a Bird, Helen, The Persians, Penelope, Septimus and Clarissa, and Ajax in Iraq. Regional and international venues include: The Guthrie Theater, Actors’ Theater of Louisville, Almeida Theater, London, Intiman, Mark Taper Forum and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Off Broadway: New York Theater Workshop, National Actors’ Theater, CSC and the Public Theater. As an actor she is best known for having originated the role of the Angel in Angels in America, appearing in all American productions through the original Broadway run, 1993-1994.
Adam Rapp has been the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships for his plays, stories and novels. He received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for an American Playwright in Mid-Career, won the Benjamin H. Danks Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and was named a 2006 Pulitzer Prize finalist for his play, Red Light Winter. Rapp is also the author of young adult novels 33 Snowfish, Punkzilla, a 2010 Printz Honor Book, and Under the Wolf, Under the Dog, which was short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His new adult novel, Know Your Beholder, will be published by Little, Brown & Co. in March.
PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000): Awarded to a writer whose body of work represents an exceptional contribution to the field of literary sports writing.
JUDGES:
Mike Barnicle is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist, and social and political commentator. He is a regular contributor on MSNBC’s popular Morning Joe program, and often comments on television and in print about the news of the day. Mike Barnicle has written more than 4,000 newspaper columns, and continues to write for TIME magazine, Newsweek / The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, ESPN The Magazine, Grantland, Politico, Esquire, and many others. A graduate of Boston University, Barnicle resides in suburban Boston with his family.
Franklin Foer is an American journalist and former editor of The New Republic. He is a 2012 Bernard L. Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation. Before joining The New Republic, Foer was a frequent contributor to the online magazine Slate. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Spin, U.S. News & World Report, Lingua Franca, The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, and more. In 2004 he published his first book, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization which was followed by How Football Explains the World. Foer also coedited the book Jewish Jocks.
Selena Roberts spent 25 years in corporate media covering the most important sports stories and athletes of our time. In four years at Sports Illustrated, she wrote commentaries that were cited by the American Society of Magazine Editors and appeared in The Best American Sports Writing and The Best American Magazine Writing. From 1996 to 2007, Selena was a sports reporter for The New York Times and was honored by the APSE and Arthur Ashe Foundation for her work as a beat writer and columnist for pieces that illuminated the paradox of sport’s ability to hurt and heal.
PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship ($5,000): Awarded to an author of children’s or young-adult fiction for a book-length work-in-progress.
JUDGES:
Viola Canales graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, served as a captain in the U.S. Army, was a community organizer for the United Farm Workers, practiced law, held a presidential-level appointment in the Clinton Administration, worked with chief executive officers, but never stopped writing stories to conjure up the magical world of her barrio. She published a short story collection, Orange Candy Slices and Other Secret Tales and a novel, The Tequila Worm which won the 2006 Pura Belpré Award. She also published El Gusano de Tequila—her Spanish translation of the novel—and a bilingual book of poems The Little Devil & The Rose (El Diablito y La Rosa).
Selene Castrovilla is an award-winning teen and children’s author. Melt, her latest teen novel, has been hailed as “a fresh, emotionally complex bildungsroman of young American love” by Kirkus. Her nonfiction children’s books are known for their humanity. Revolutionary Friends, about George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette, will soon be joined by Revolutionary Rogues, about Benedict Arnold. A contributing author to UncommonYA, Selene holds an MFA in creative writing from New School University and a BA in English from New York University. She lives on Long Island with her two sons.
Elizabeth Levy is the award-winning author of over 100 books for children and young adults. She is known for the humor that she brings to the emotional life of her characters. Levy has presented writing workshops around the world from Dubai to New Delhi to New Jersey. For a full list of her books go to www.elizabethlevy.com.
PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry ($5,000) For an emerging American poet showing promise of further literary achievement.
JUDGES:
Marie Howe is the author of three volumes of poetry, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, The Good Thief, and What the Living Do, and she is the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. She has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and Stanley Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, AGNI, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. She is the Poet Laureate of New York State.
Mary Szybist is most recently the author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. Her first book Granted won the 2004 GLCA New Writers Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Portland, Oregon where she teaches at Lewis & Clark College. Photo Credit: Joni Kabana
Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of four books, including To Keep Love Blurry and the forthcoming The Trembling Answers. He is currently editing the selected writings of Delmore Schwartz and working on a book of essays.
PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing ($2,500) Awarded to a magazine editor for their contribution to the publication he or she edits.
JUDGES:
Christopher Castellani is the author of three novels, most recently All This Talk of Love, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. He works as the artistic director of Grub Street and teaches fiction in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His next book is The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story, forthcoming from Graywolf in 2016. He was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction.
Carmela Ciuraru is the author of Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, published by HarperCollins, and the editor of several poetry anthologies. She writes a regular column for The New York Times, and has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Daily Beast, Salon, and many other publications. She is on the Board of the National Book Critics Circle. Her next book is forthcoming from HarperCollins.
Bill Clegg is a literary agent in New York and the author of the memoirs Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and Ninety Days. He has written for The New York Times, Lapham’s Quarterly, New York Magazine, The Guardian, and Harper’s Bazaar. His debut novel, Did You Ever Have A Family, is forthcoming from Scout Press in fall of 2015.
PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation For a translator whose career has demonstrated a commitment to excellence through the body of his or her work.
JUDGES: The winner is chosen by the PEN Translation Committee, chaired by Margaret Carson and Alex Zucker.
PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants ($2,000-$4,000): To support the translation of book-length works into English.
JUDGES:
Esther Allen is a writer and translator who teaches at Baruch College, City University of New York. Her recent books include The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim & a Life in Translation (Open Letter Press, 2014), which she co-edited. More info at www.estherallen.com
Mitzi Angel was editorial director at Fourth Estate in London before moving to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where she is vice president and executive editor. In the UK, she published Alaa Al Aswany, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Rivka Galchen, James Gleick, Ben Goldacre, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Yiyun Li, among others. At FSG, her authors include Donald Antrim, Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner, David Means, Paul Murray and playwright Sarah Ruhl. She won the 2010 French-American Foundation Translation Prize for her translation of 03, a novel by Jean-Christophe Valtat, and is an adjunct professor at the Columbia University School of Arts, where she teaches in the Creative Writing MFA program.
Peter Blackstock is an Editor at Grove Atlantic. His list includes literary fiction, nonfiction, drama, with a particular focus on international voices and writing in translation. Originally from England, where he studied German and Russian at Oxford University, he now lives in Queens.
Howard Goldblatt translates fiction from China and Taiwan, including the novels of Nobelist Mo Yan, for which he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment of the Arts. He lives, works, and cycles in Boulder, Colorado.
Sara Khalili is an editor and translator of contemporary Iranian literature. Her translations include Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandanipour, Kissing the Sword: A Prison Memoir by Shahrnush Parsipur, The Book of Fate by Parinoush Saniee, and The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons by Goli Taraghi. She has also translated several volumes of poetry by Forough Farrokhzad, Simin Behbahani, Siavash Kasraii, and Fereydoon Moshiri. Her short story translations have appeared in The Literary Review, The Kenyon Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, EPOCH, Words Without Borders, and PEN America.
Michael F. Moore is the chair of the PEN/Heim Translation Fund and an interpreter/translator from Italian. His most recent translations include Live Bait by Fabio Genovesi, Agostino by Alberto Moravia, and The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. He is currently working on a new translation of the nineteenth-century classic The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni.
Declan Spring is Vice President, Senior Editor, and Director of Foreign Rights at New Directions. He received his BA in English from University of Rochester and his MA in English from NYU. He has been working at New Directions since 1991.
Alex Zucker has translated novels by Czech authors Jáchym Topol, Miloslava Holubová, Petra Hůlová, and Patrik Ouředník. He currently serves as co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee. Among the honors he has received are an English PEN Award for Writing in Translation and the ALTA National Translation Award. His translation of Heda Margolius Kovály’s Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street will be out from Soho Press in June 2015.