PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature

Vinod Kumar Shukla is generally recognized as one of the greatest living writers in the Hindi language. A short story writer, novelist, poet, and essayist of extraordinary sophistication, his works balance an uncommon directness and simplicity with a remarkable integrity. Reclusive and singularly focused on his writing, Shukla’s prose and poetry are marked by acute, often defamiliarizing, observation and a remarkable intellect. A lifetime spent in North Indian small towns has only helped to sharpen the originality of his vision. In his writings, the voice that emerges is that of a deeply intelligent onlooker; a daydreamer struck occasionally by wonder. His work, once encountered, is easy to surrender to, but difficult to pin down or categorize. Though one might easily compare him to Kafka, Borges, Kiarostami, or Italian neorealist cinema, Shukla remains wholly original. Writing for decades without the recognition he deserves, Shukla has created literature that changes how we understand the modern. With this award, the 2023 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature acknowledges a writer as well as a tradition, or traditions, of anomalousness in literature without which we cannot fully grasp our history or inhabit our present.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is a transformative figure in African literature. For nearly sixty years, he has been committed to telling the stories of a country and a people whose political destiny was brutally interrupted by outsiders. In novels like Weep Not Child, A Grain of Wheat, The River Between, and Wizard of the Crow he has portrayed with great honesty and sensitivity the lasting divisions that colonial rule sowed within families and cultures, the damage wrought by the dictatorships that followed independence, and the joys of finding freedom in all its forms—personal, political, and linguistic.