This year's PEN literary awards--presented May 15 at Lincoln Center in New York City--featured three new prizes and a controversy regarding the winner of one of them. The new prizes are the $20,000 PEN/Nabokov Award, given to essayist and novelist William Gass; the $10,000 PEN/Architectural Digest Award, awarded to Anne Hollander for Feeding the Eye (FSG); and the $10,000 PEN/Amazon.com Short Story prize, which was won by Meera Nair, an M.F.A. student at New York University. But questions have been raised about Nair's eligibility.
The rules for the short story prize say that anyone who has been published in a national periodical with a circulation of more than 5,000 is ineligible. Diana Ayton-Shenker, a spokesperson for PEN, confirmed to PW that "questions have been raised about Nair. We are taking them seriously. We are looking into them and we will issue a statement as soon as possible." If Nair retains the prize, her short story "Video"will be posted on the Amazon.com Web site and published in the Boston Book Review.
The winners in the career achievement category are Heather McHugh, recipient of the $5,000 PEN/V lcker Award for P try, and Edmund Keeley, who received the PEN/ Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation.
The book award winners: the PEN/Spielvogel Diamonstein Essay prize ($5,000) was awarded to Annie Dillard for For the Time Being (Knopf); the PEN/ Martha Albrand first nonfiction prize ($1,000) went to Eileen Welsome for The Plutonium Files (Dial); the PEN/Martha Albrand memoir prize ($1,000) was awarded to Jeffery Smith for Where the Roots Reach for Water (North Point); the winner of PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize ($3,000) was Richard Sieburth, translator of Selected Writings by Gerard De Nerval (Penguin); the PEN Award for P try in Translation ($3,000) went to James Brasfield and Oleh Lysheha for their translation of The Selected P ms of Oleh Lysheha (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute); and the Renato Pogglioli Translation Prize ($3,000) was awarded to Wendell Ricketts for his translation of La segretaria and other one-act plays by Natalia Ginzburg.
