Winner
Bradford Morrow, editor of Conjunctions
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 $2,500 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.
2007 Judges
Barbara Ascher, Robert Polito, and Melanie Thernstrom
From the Judges’ Citation
“We were astonished to discover that Bradford Morrow has not already won this award, after 25 years of editing almost by himself one of our most distinctive and valuable literary magazines. We saw this year as a chance to correct that oversight. The range of writers he publishes (and often discovers) is a sort of who’s who of 20th/21st century serious writing, and he’s found a way to keep reinventing it. The fiction, poetry, criticism, drama, and art is sometimes described as ‘experimental,’ but we would also say innovative, daring, indispensable, and beautiful. Our best writers manifestly trust Bradford Morrow with their most ambitious work, and we can think of no higher praise for a literary magazine, or its editor.”