PEN/Audible Literary Service Award
The PEN/Audible Literary Service Award honors an important writer whose work has drawn a wide audience and who helps us understand the human condition in original and powerful ways.
Honorees
Paul Simon, 2024 PEN/Audible Literary Service Award
Songwriting legend Paul Simon has inspired fans worldwide with lyrics and songs that entire generations know by heart and can recognize from the very first notes. Simon’s restless musical journey has transformed the American songbook with evocative and universally resonant storytelling that roams the landscape from the bodegas of New York City and the highways of New Jersey to Graceland, the bayous of Louisiana, and across continents. Taking inspiration from the sounds of the American South, Cuba, South Africa, South America and the British isles, he expanded our understanding of humanity through his uniquely blended rhythms and songs.
Lorne Michaels, 2023 PEN/Audible Literary Service Award
Lorne Michaels is an award-winning producer and writer, best known as the creator and executive producer of “Saturday Night Live,” the most Emmy Award-nominated show in television history. Michaels’ television credits also include “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” “30 Rock,” “Portlandia,” “Schmigadoon” and “Kids in the Hall.” His motion picture credits include “Three Amigos,” “Wayne’s World,” “Tommy Boy,” “Mean Girls” and “MacGruber.” On Broadway, Michaels produced “Gilda Radner – Live From New York,” which he also directed, “Mean Girls,” the Tony Award-nominated Broadway musical based on the hit movie, and Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt.”
Zadie Smith, 2022 PEN/Audible Literary Service Award
Through her trenchant, moving, and inventive writing—which includes novels White Teeth, Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, Swing Time, short stories (Grand Union: Stories) and essay collections (Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, Feel Free, and Intimations)—and professorship, Smith has helped guide future generations of writers and readers to embrace and explore culture across genres and media. Smith’s fiction meticulously charts characters’ social surroundings and entangled if disparate existences, pushing against imposed boundaries of race and class, creating space for important conversations.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., 2021 PEN/Audible Literary Service Award
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, has, across a vast career, authored or co-authored more than 20 books and created more than 20 documentary films, including the acclaimed PBS series Finding Your Roots. He was honored by his former student—Academy and Golden Globe Award-winning actor and director Jodie Foster—and former teacher—playwright, political activist, and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka with the 2021 PEN/Audible Literary Service Award.
Patti Smith, 2020 PEN/Audible Literary Service Award
PEN America recognized writer, performer, and visual artist Patti Smith for her prolific and multifaceted career, across which she has written arrestingly lucid memoirs and poetry; paired vital literary and raw punk sensibilities in her music; and, through it all, demonstrated an unflinching determination to protest injustice and speak truth. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary merging of poetry and rock. She has released 12 albums, including Horses, which has been hailed as one of the top one hundred albums of all time by Rolling Stone.
Bob Woodward, 2019 Literary Service Award Honoree
The 2019 PEN America Literary Service Award was given to Bob Woodward, The Washington Post editor had one of the biggest political books of 2018 with Fear: Trump in the White House, with nearly two million copies sold. Woodward played a central role in bringing to light Richard Nixon’s role during the Watergate scandal through his reporting for The Washington Post and wrote a number of books on the subject, including All the President’s Men: The Greatest Reporting Story of All Time, written with Carl Bernstein. He has also tackled a number of other presidents including George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Stephen King, 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award
Stephen King is the author of more than 50 books, all of them worldwide best sellers and many—including such classics as It, The Stand, The Dark Tower, Misery, Lisey’s Story, 11/22/63, On Writing, Under the Dome, and many more—providing the basis for major motion pictures and serving as cultural hallmarks for generations. Among his many accolades are the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the 2014 National Medal of Arts presented by Barack Obama. His depictions of horror and violence have also earned him a title as one of the most banned or challenged authors in recent decades. King is an impassioned advocate of freedom of expression, literacy, and access to information, which he and his wife Tabitha support through their philanthropy. King’s Haven Foundation also provides unique and generous support to writers and other freelancers in the arts who have suffered personal hardship. His outspoken defense against encroachments on free speech and pointed public criticism of policies that infringe on this and other rights have resulted in his being blocked by President Trump on Twitter.
Stephen Sondheim, 2017 Pen/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award
Stephen Sondheim has delighted audiences worldwide for more than six decades with witty lyrics, contagious melodies, and unforgettable characters that comprise some of America’s most beloved and timeless musicals. Paying forward the mentorship of Oscar Hammerstein II that catalyzed his successful career, Sondheim dedicates much of his time to nurturing young writers and composers. In 1981, he also founded Young Playwrights Inc., the only organization of its kind committed to the development of aspiring playwrights under age 18.
J.K. Rowling, 2016 PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award
J.K. Rowling has used her talents and stature as a writer to fight inequality on both a local and global level. Herself the frequent object of censorship in schools and libraries across the globe, as well as online targeting, Rowling has emerged as a vocal proponent of free expression and access to literature and ideas for children, as well as incarcerated people, the learning-disabled, and women and girls worldwide.
Tom Stoppard, 2015 PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award
Tom Stoppard’s extraordinary career as a dramatist and his abiding commitment to the defense of creative freedom worldwide won him the 2015 PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award. Stoppard’s critically acclaimed works have brought new and powerful perspectives on the human condition to wide audiences over a remarkably prolific decades-long career, exploring the social and political forces that shape individual identity.
Salman Rushdie, 2014 PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award
The award recognizes Rushdie’s unparalleled artistry and courage as a novelist and essayist, as well as his role in founding and building the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. The PEN World Voices Festival, the United States’ only international literary festival, has brought more than 1,500 writers from 78 countries speaking 56 different languages to New York since 2005, serving as a vital platform for cross-cultural dialogue involving authors, journalists, intellectuals, and thought leaders on issues central to individual rights and freedoms.
Philip Roth
2013 PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award
Edward Albee
2012 PEN Literary Service Award
Michael Ondaatje
2011 PEN Literary Service Award
Margaret Atwood
2010 PEN Literary Service Award
E.L. Doctorow
2009 PEN/Borders Literary Service Award
Toni Morrison
2008 PEN/Borders Literary Service Award
Gore Vidal
2007 PEN/Borders Literary Service Award