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PEN American Center Announces Winners of the 2011 PEN Literary Awards
PEN American Center , the largest branch of the world’s oldest literary and human rights organization, today announced the winners and runners up of the 2011 PEN Awards, the most comprehensive literary awards program in the country. Next year will mark PEN’s 90th anniversary. For more than 50 of those years, PEN’s Literary Awards program has honored many of the most outstanding voices in literature. This year, PEN will present 17 awards, fellowships, grants, and prizes — including one that has been revived after a five-year hiatus, the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and three awards offered for the first time ever: the PEN Emerging Writers Awards, the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing. With the help of its partners and supporters, PEN will confer nearly $150,000 in 2011 to some of the most gifted writers, editors, and translators working today. Award winners and runners up will be honored at the 2011 PEN Literary Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, October 12, 2011, at CUNY Graduate Center’s Proshansky Auditorium in New York City. “PEN’s literary awards program is at the heart of what we do,” said PEN President Anthony Appiah. “What ties all our work together — whether we are defending free expression or supporting translation or sustaining literacy — is the aim of nurturing literary culture. By publicly honoring the writers, editors, and translators who create the works we read, we celebrate the connections between readers and writers that shape our literary community. It is our hope that the awards will sustain writers with our respect and our gratitude, as well as help to bring them to the attention of new readers. We owe a special debt of thanks to the sterling judges, who are themselves distinguished writers, and to the generous donors who endow these awards.” Alice Quinn, PEN Awards Committee Chair, added: “The PEN Literary Awards convey something very specific and marvelous to the winners and finalists: the high regard of their peers and heroes.” See the listing for the richest prize of the 2011 Pen Awards below; see a complete listing of the results at http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/1351 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize ($25,000): To a fiction writer whose debut work, published in 2010, represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise.* Judges: Susan Cheever, Paul Harding, and Yiyun Li. (*This year, the judges have chosen two winners to share the award.) WINNERS: Susanna Daniel, Stiltsville (Harper Perennial) and Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead) RUNNER UP: Teddy Wayne, Kapitoil (Harper Perennial) 
