Northshire Bookstore Manchester Center Vermont

The Center has a membership of 2,900 distinguished writers, editors, and translators. In addition to defending writers in prison or in danger of imprisonment for their work, PEN American Center sponsors public literary programs and forums on current issues, sends prominent authors to inner-city schools to encourage reading and writing, administers literary prizes, promotes international literature that might otherwise go unread in the United States, and offers grants and loans to writers facing financial or medical emergencies.

2009

CAREER ACHIEVEMENT

The PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction

This year's honoree is Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy's fiction parallels his movement from the Southeast to the West - the first four novels being set in Tennessee, the last three in the Southwest and Mexico.

The PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation

This year's honoree is Michael Henry Heim

Michael Henry Heim is one of the great translator humanists of our time. His vision of world literature and farsighted promotion of translation have been an inspiration to generations.

FICTION

PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers

This year's award goes to Donald Ray Pollock

For his collection Knockemstiff (Doubleday).

BOOKS

The PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

The 2009 award will be given to Richard Brody

For Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (Metropolitan Books).

The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction

The 2009 award goes to Steve Coll

For The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (The Penguin Press).

PLAYWRITING

The PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Awards for Drama

This year's Master playwright award goes to Sam Shepard

Best known for his plays Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, True West, Fool for Love, and A Lie of the Mind.

The PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Awards for Drama

The mid-career award goes to Nilo Cruz

Whose works include Anna in the Tropics, Beauty of the Father, Lorca in a Green Dress, Two Sisters and a Piano, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, Dancing on Her Knees, and A Park in Our House.

CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

The PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship

This year's award goes to Carol Lynch Williams

Author of the forthcoming A Glimpse Is All I Can Stand, for which she is receiving the award.

TRANSLATION

The PEN Translation Prize

This year's award goes to Natasha Wimmer

For her translation from the Spanish of Roberto Bolano's 2666 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

This year's award goes to Marilyn Hacker

For her translation from the French of King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Etienne (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).