Winner
Philip Roth
The PEN/Nabokov Award is given to a living author whose body of work, either written in or translated into English, is of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship. The PEN/Nabokov Award is made possible by the Vladimir Nabokov Foundation, founded by Dimitri Nabokov.
2006 Judges
Richard Ford, Stacy Schiff, and Michael Wood
From the Judges’ Citation
“In a series of works that have shaped our very idea of what modern writing can do, from Goodbye, Columbus through Portnoy’s Complaint, The Ghost Writer, Operation Shylock, and Sabbath’s Theater to The Plot Against America and the new novel, Everyman, Roth has brought struggle and style into an amazing array of confrontations. In explaining his world to himself, in creating that unforgettable world for us to see, he shows us who we are, especially in those aspects, comic, lubricious, melancholy, haunted, angry, that keep us most alive and get us most into trouble. We scarcely know what to do with him, but we certainly know we couldn’t do without him.”
Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for his novel American Pastoral. He has twice received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Award. In 2002, he joined the company of William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, and Saul Bellow when he received the prestigious Gold Medal in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Roth has published 27 books, among them: Goodbye, Columbus (1959), When She Was Good (1967), The Counterlife (1986), Patrimony (1991), Operation Shylock: A Confession (1994), Sabbath’s Theater (1995), American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), The Human Stain (2000), The Dying Animal (2001), and The Plot Against America (2004). May 2006 saw the publication of his latest novel, Everyman, from Houghton Mifflin.