PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir
The PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir is awarded for a first published memoir, distinguished by qualities of literary and stylistic excellence. The $1,000 prize was the second award made possible by a bequest from the late PEN member and mystery writer Martha Albrand, who wished to call attention to first works in various genres, and complemented the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction.
Winners
1998 Peter Balakian, Black Dog of Fate (Basic)
1999 Ted Solotaroff, Truth Comes in Blows (Norton)
2000 Jeffery Smith, Where the Roots Reach for Water (North Point Press/Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
2001 C. K. Williams, Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
2002 Marie Arana, American Chica (Dial)
2003 Rick Moody, The Black Veil (Little Brown)
2004 Anthony Swofford, Jarhead (Scribner)
2005 Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (W.W. Norton & Company)
2006 Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents (New Directions)
2006 judges: Annabel Davis Goff, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Dani Shapiro
From the judges citation: Gregory Rabassa’s memoir is a beautifully idiosyncratic collage of recollections about the author’s great career as translator of such writers as Julio Cortázar, José Lezama Lima, and Gabriel García Márquez. Rabassa’s own voice, stripped of the masks of the writers he has so memorably impersonated, shines through with a baroque jumpiness and suppleness of its own. Table talk of the highest order, this book is an opinionated and informative survey of Latin American literature as well as a warmly digressive account of a life immersed in letters; as a biographia literaria, it demonstrates that ‘real life’ takes place inside literature, not merely outside of it.