PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing
The PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing honored a nonfiction book about sports. Eligible titles were of a biographical, investigative, historical, or analytical nature and of the strongest literary character.
Featured Honoree: Rowan Ricardo Phillips, 2019 Winner
The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, Rowan Ricardo Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
From the judges’ citation: “The Circuit is a dizzy, unbridled, obsessive book about a love for tennis told by recounting the minutiae of the 2017 men’s season. Phillips transforms details into poetry as he follows the season-long trajectory of a gaggle of players culminating in a showdown between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. A book lovingly built for fans and non-fans alike, Phillips is uncommonly generous with the reader, taking time to render the game’s fine points with a ceremonious attention that can only be described as devotion. Such observance turns sport narrative into near religious text, and set against the dark backdrop of a Trump election and the author’s own recovery from a heinous Achilles injury, the book becomes a meditation on all things gorgeous and grave about the fragile human spirit and all it seeks to—and fails—to accomplish.”
Judges: Chris Bachelder, Rafi Kohan, Carvell Wallace
Read a transcript of Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s acceptance speech »
Winners
2019 Rowan Ricardo Phillips, The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
2018 Jonathan Eig, Ali: A Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
2015 John Branch, Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard (W.W. Norton & Company)
2013 Mark Kram, Jr., Like Any Normal Day: A Story of Devotion (St. Martin’s Press)
2012 Dan Barry, Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game (Harper)