Yesterday, PEN America announced the revival of the former PEN/Nabokov Award as the $50,000 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, which will honor "an international writer whose work, either written in or translated into English, represents the highest level of achievement in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and/or drama, and is of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship."
The winner will be selected by a panel of five internationally recognized writers who will serve as judges. The award, which is not open to public nominations, honors a writer born or residing outside the U.S. for an outstanding body of work over a sustained career. It will be conferred for the first time in 2017, with the inaugural recipient to be named in February at the PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony in New York.
This decision marks a renewed partnership between PEN America and the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation, who together created the $20,000 PEN/Nabokov Award for Fiction in 2000 and offered it biennially through 2008. Winners included Mavis Gallant, William H. Gass, Mario Vargas Llosa, Cynthia Ozick and Philip Roth.
PEN America President Andrew Solomon commented: "The new PEN/Nabokov Award is the first PEN America honor specifically focused on international writers. At a time when there is too little dialogue between nations, it will draw attention to outstanding global voices that may be unknown to most U.S. readers. It is a welcome counterbalance to rampant xenophobia and increasingly jingoistic provincialism. In renewing our close collaboration with the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation, PEN America pays tribute to the cross-cultural legacy of one of the most revered multinational PEN Members, a master of storytelling: Vladimir Nabokov."