NEW YORK, Aug 17 — PEN America has announced that the Nabokov award, which ran biennially from 2000-2008, will be brought back in 2017, with its conditions modified to focus on multi-genre work by writers from outside the US. Its title will change from the “PEN/Nabokov Award for Fiction” to “PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.”
The original Nabokov Award
Launched in 2000, the Nabokov Award was first created to honour (translated) fiction from around the world. Named after the Russian-American “master of storytelling” novelist Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita, Pale Fire, Speak, Memory), the award initially offered a prize of US$20,000 (RM80,000) to any “living author whose body of work, either written in or translated into English, is of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship.” Previous winners were William H. Gass (2000), Mario Vargas Llosa (2002), Mavis Gallant (2004), Philip Roth (2006) and Cynthia Ozick (2008).
The ‘revitalised’ PEN/Nabokov Award
In an attempt to “draw attention to outstanding global voices that may be unknown to most US readers,” according to PEN America President Andrew Solomon, the revived Nabokov Award will be specifically attributed to writers living outside the US whose work has been translated into English. Work will be considered from a wide variety of genres, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.
Closed to public nominations, five international (as yet unnamed) writers will make up the jury for the new award, financed by PEN America in collaboration with the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation, which was founded by the author’s only child, the late Dmitri Nabokov.
The PEN America Literary Awards
The awards ceremony for the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature will take place in New York in February 2017. The US$50,000 prize will bring the total money awarded by PEN via grants and prizes (25 in all) up to US$315,000 in 2017, almost double the 2015 sum. — AFP-Relaxnews
