The PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction is awarded by the PEN American Center "to a distinguished living American author of fiction whose body of work in English possesses qualities of excellence, ambition, and scale of achievement over a sustained career which place him or her in the highest rank of American literature." Initially carrying a stipend of US$40,000, the award was created with the cooperation of the Saul Bellow estate and through a grant from Evelyn Stefansson Nef. Announcing the first recipient of the award (Bellow's close friend Philip Roth), PEN president Ron Chernow said the award honors "one of America’s greatest writers...whose work over a forty-year career exemplified the capacity of fiction to encompass the totality of human experience. We are confident that this Award will help to recognize and perpetuate the qualities so evident in Saul Bellow’s writings."
The award was first given in 2007.
The award is one of many PEN awards sponsored by International PEN affiliates in over 145 PEN centers around the world. The PEN American Center awards have been characterized as being among the "major" American literary prizes.
Read more about PEN/Saul Bellow Award For Achievement In American Fiction: Award Winners
Famous quotes containing the words pen, saul, bellow, award, achievement, american and/or fiction:
“If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would get written at all. It might be better to ask yourself “Why?” afterwards than before. Anyway, the force from somewhere in Space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“The last publicized center of American writing was Manhattan. Its writers became known as the New York Intellectuals. With important connections to publishing, and universities, with access to the major book reviews, they were able to pose as the vanguard of American culture when they were so obsessed with the two Joes—McCarthy and Stalin—that they were to produce only two artists, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, who left town.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“I think that New York is not the cultural center of America, but the business and administrative center of American culture.”
—Saul Bellow (b. 1915)
“The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“Art—the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“If Shakespeare has not been equalled, he is sure to be surpassed, and surpassed by an American born now or yet to be born.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“We ignore thriller writers at our peril. Their genre is the political condition. They massage our dreams and magnify our nightmares. If it is true that we always need enemies, then we will always need writers of fiction to encode our fears and fantasies.”
—Daniel Easterman (b. 1949)