The PEN/Saul Bellow Award, presented from 2009-2018, was given biennially to a living American author whose scale of achievement in fiction, over a sustained career, placed them in the highest rank of American literature.
Established in 2009 in memory of Saul Bellow, the award of $25,000 commemorated his love of literature and his contribution to American fiction.
In keeping with his legacy, recipients of the award have demonstrated a profound impact on the landscape of American fiction. Recipients of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction include Edmund White, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, E.L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Philip Roth.
2018 SAUL BELLOW AWARD WINNER
Edmund White
From the judge’s citations: “Unsentimental tenderness, sharply observant wit, and an unsparing examination of the self, mark the fiction of this year’s winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. The previous winners of this prize have brought to life facets of the American experience. White adds to this accumulated brilliance his early trilogy, an American Epic about coming of age as a gay man in the Midwest, and his later works, often situated in the expatriate’s Paris which has always maintained a rich presence in our national consciousness.”
“To the age of AIDS, the age of loss, the struggle against evangelical Christian hatred, the explosion of gender identities, Edmund White employs a deceptively light touch. He writes about pleasure with amused defiance, and brings questions of moral complexity to bear in relationships with the lost, the troubled, the mortally ill. At the same time, White is life’s great appreciator. His work emanates delight in sensuality, beauty, the intellect, and all that constitutes bliss in this world.”
“Edmund White personifies a cosmopolitan Americanism at home in the world, yet increasingly endangered at home. His great subject is the vexed magnificence of love. His great art is to make that subject belong to everyone. It gives the judges great pleasure to confer the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction for 2018 upon Edmund White.”
Edmund White is known best for A Boy’s Own Story, The Farewell Symphony, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and, most recently, Our Young Man.
2018 Judges
 | ADAM JOHNSON is the author of Fortune Smiles, winner of the National Book Award, and The Orphan Master’s Son, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and other prizes. Johnson’s other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Stegner Fellowship; he was also a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. Johnson teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco. |
 | LOUISE ERDRICH is the author of fifteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories, and a memoir. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. Erdrich has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction and the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. She lives in Minnesota and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. |
 | POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR was born in Tehran in 1978 and raised in the Greater Los Angeles area. She is most recently the recipient of a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing (Prose). Her debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove/Atlantic, 2007) was a New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” Chicago Tribune “Fall’s Best,” and 2007 California Book Award winner. Her next book is her first memoir: Sick will be published by HarperCollins (May 2018). |
