PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

The PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography is awarded for excellence in the art of biography. This prize of $5,000 goes to the author of a distinguished work published in the United States during the previous calendar year. The winning title is considered by the judges to be a work of exceptional literary, narrative, and artistic merit, based on scrupulous research.

All winners, finalists, and longlisters for this award are eligible to receive PEN America’s official emblems. If you are a publisher and interested in obtaining PEN America’s award emblem, please write to [email protected]. For more information, please visit our Awards FAQ page.

2025 Winner

For a biography of exceptional literary, narrative, and artistic merit, based on scrupulous research.

Winner: Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball, Keith O’Brien (Pantheon, 2024)

From the judges’ citation: “Pete Rose was unpolished, unstoppable, and above all, driven to win, win, and win again. Keith O’Brien’s monumental, nuanced biography—Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball—evokes Rose’s headlong rush in a scrupulously reported, relentless narrative that tracks Rose from his working-class Cincinnati childhood, to his rise and reign and ultimate ruin in baseball. Winning was everything in the Rose cosmos, and that impulse fed the addiction that caused Rose to violate baseball’s cardinal rule against gambling on one’s own games, pulling the lovers, teammates, owners, parasites, bookies, and fans who orbited around him into an inescapable void.

Charlie Hustle is not the first biography of Pete Rose, but it is the first one for which Rose spoke to an author without having some kind of editorial control. According to O’Brien, Rose was cooperative at first, and then, perhaps from shame or fear, cut off communication. In that truncated contact, O’Brien found something profound. Yet the author’s true achievement is in the breadth and depth of his reporting and research, in conversations with dozens upon dozens of sources, in poring over court records and contemporaneous journalism. That wealth of knowledge and understanding is illuminated by O’Brien’s artful, urgent prose, filled with portents and precedents that feel as epic and mythic as the sport itself. In exploring a realm dominated by male characters, O’Brien takes extra care to portray the women in his narrative as important actors with complexity and agency—not as mere collateral damage in Rose’s wreckage.

Like many great biographies, Charlie Hustle is about more than the story of its subject. It is a history of baseball—and particularly the intractable, intertwined relationship between the game and gambling, culminating in Rose’s permanent banishment from the sport, and punctuated by the irony of the emergence of legalized sports betting. It is about the eternal duel between principle and corruption, about the very reasons a collective adopts rules, and what happens when we allow them to be bent, or broken, so that we can have our own, individual victories. And it is a book about working-class America, caught up in that duality. The judges, while reading this book, could not help but feel that the dynamic behind this story—particularly the way in which many of Rose’s white, midwestern fans continued to believe in Rose’s professed innocence even after it was resoundingly debunked—speaks greatly to the current political moment. Our consensus seemed to be confirmed when, after our decision, the current President suggested a posthumous Federal pardon for Pete Rose. The rules are a reflection of our impartial ideal; but their partial application is our reality. 

“Winning is what counts,” Pete Rose once said. “They don’t pay you to lose.” Charlie Hustle is a book about the costs of winning at all costs, and the worthlessness of apologies that come too late. Keith O’Brien has captured, in telling the story of a flawed, fallen American icon, a fable for our American age.”

History

Eligibility

• A candidate’s biography must have been published by a trade publisher in the United States between January 1 and December 31 of the applicable calendar year.
• Eligible books must be written by a single, living author.
• Candidates need not be U.S. residents or citizens.
• Books must be works by an author about another person. Memoir and autobiography are ineligible, unless the work significantly focuses on the life of another person.
• If you submit a book for this award, you may not submit it for any additional PEN America Literary Award, with the exception of the PEN Open Book Award. Please note that the PEN/Faulkner Award is not considered a PEN America Literary Award.

Submission Guidelines

• All submitted books must be published by a trade or academic publisher between January 1 and December 31 in the applicable year. Self-published books are ineligible for the PEN America Literary Awards.
• Books with more than one original author are ineligible for the PEN America Literary Awards.
• PEN America will only accept submissions from publishers or literary agents. Authors may not submit their own books.
• On the submission form, please select the award you are submitting to.
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• Please submit verified email addresses on the submission form. Your order cannot be processed without an email address. Additional contacts are required so that we may be in contact directly if an author or translator is selected as a longlister, finalist, and/or winner.
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