New York City, June 9, 2010—PEN American Center, the largest branch of the world’s oldest literary and human rights organization, announced today that writers Robert Lipsyte, Tim O’Brien, and Susan Orlean will be the jurors for the inaugural PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, an award established to honor the best nonfiction books about sports. This prize represents the first-ever partnership between PEN and ESPN, the world’s leading purveyor of sports journalism through its television networks, web site, and magazine.

The award will be given to one nonfiction book each year. Biographical, investigative, historical, and analytical books of a strong and distinctive literary character will all be considered. The award will be open to all such books published in the United States in the year prior to the conferral of the award.

Submissions must be postmarked by June 15, 2010 in order to be eligible. Submission instructions are available online at www.pen.org/espn. In future years, titles will be accepted during PEN’s regular submission period, which runs from September 1 through mid-December each year.

The 2010 PEN Literary Awards will be presented at The Graduate Center, CUNY, on Wednesday, October 13, 2010. The other awards to be given that night are the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers, for the author of a superlative and promising debut work of fiction; the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, honoring an outstanding living author; the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, honoring an outstanding American poet; the PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Awards for Drama, honoring a mid-career playwright and a master American dramatist; the PEN Beyond Margins Awards, honoring three authors of color; the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship, for a young adult or children’s book author with a work in progress; the PEN/Edward and Lily Tuck Award, honoring the living author of a great work of Paraguayan literature; the PEN Translation Fund Grants, given to translators with works in progress; the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography; the PEN Translation Prize; and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Each year, with the help of its partners and supporters, PEN confers over $100,000 to writers and translators.

More information about the PEN Literary Awards can be found at www.pen.org/awards.

About PEN American Center

PEN American Center is the largest of the 141 centers of International PEN, the world’s oldest human rights organization and the oldest international literary organization. International PEN was founded in 1921 to dispel national, ethnic, and racial hatreds and to promote understanding among all countries. PEN American Center, founded a year later, works to advance literature, to defend free expression, and to foster international literary fellowship. Its 3,400 distinguished Members carry on the achievements in literature and the advancement of human rights of such past Members as James Baldwin, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Arthur Miller, Marianne Moore, Eugene O’Neill, Susan Sontag, and John Steinbeck. To learn more about PEN American Center, please visit: www.pen.org.

Nick Burd, (212) 334-1660, ext. 108