Louise Erdrich Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts Us Canada

PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction

The PEN/Saul Bellow Accolade is given biennially to a living American author whose scale of achievement in fiction, over a sustained career, places him or her in the highest rank of American literature. With a prize of $25,000, the PEN/Saul Bellow is one of PEN America's nearly prestigious literary awards and is selected by a panel of esteemed authors, including past winners. Past judges have included Philip Roth, George Saunders, and Zadie Smith. This twelvemonth's judges are Louise Erdrich, Adam Johnson, and Porochista Khakpour.

Established in 2009 in memory of Saul Bellow, the award commemorates his dear of literature and his contribution to American fiction. The winner of the PEN/Malamud Award in 1989, Saul Blare won many awards during his lifetime. Of Blare, Martin Amis wrote, "His sentences seem to counterbalance more than anyone else's. He is similar a force of nature… He breaks all the rules…[T]he people in Bellow'due south fiction are real people, notwithstanding the intensity of the gaze that he bathes them in, somehow through the particular, opens upwardly into the universal."

In keeping with his legacy, recipients of the award demonstrate a profound touch on the landscape of American fiction. Past recipients of the PEN/Saul Bellow Honour for Achievement in American Fiction include Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, E.L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Philip Roth.

2018 SAUL BELLOW Honour WINNER

Edmund White

From the judge'south citations : "Unsentimental tenderness, sharply observant wit, and an unsparing examination of the self, mark the fiction of this twelvemonth's winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow Laurels for Achievement in American Fiction. The previous winners of this prize take brought to life facets of the American experience. White adds to this accumulated brilliance his early trilogy, an American Epic near coming of age every bit a gay man in the Midwest, and his later works, often situated in the expatriate's Paris which has always maintained a rich presence in our national consciousness."

"To the age of AIDS, the age of loss, the struggle confronting evangelical Christian hatred, the explosion of gender identities, Edmund White employs a deceptively light bear upon. He writes nearly pleasure with amused disobedience, and brings questions of moral complexity to bear in relationships with the lost, the troubled, the mortally ill. At the same time, White is life'south slap-up appreciator. His work emanates please in sensuality, beauty, the intellect, and all that constitutes bliss in this world."

"Edmund White personifies a cosmopolitan Americanism at home in the world, notwithstanding increasingly endangered at abode. His groovy subject is the vexed magnificence of love. His great art is to make that subject field belong to anybody. It gives the judges great pleasure to confer the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Accomplishment in American Fiction for 2018 upon Edmund White."

Edmund White is known all-time for A Boy's Own Story, The Farewell Symphony, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and, most recently, Our Young Man.

2018 Judges

	ADAM JOHNSON is the author of Fortune Smiles, winner of the National Book Honor, and The Orphan Master'due south Son, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and other prizes. Johnson's other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Stegner Fellowship; he was too a finalist for the New York Public Library's Immature Lions Honor. Johnson teaches artistic writing at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco.
	LOUISE ERDRICH is the author of 15 novels equally well as volumes of poetry, children's books, short stories, and a memoir. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Honour for Fiction. Erdrich has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction and the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. She lives in Minnesota and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a minor independent bookstore.
	POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR was born in Tehran in 1978 and raised in the Greater Los Angeles surface area. She is well-nigh recently the recipient of a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Literature Fellowship in Artistic Writing (Prose). Her debut novel Sons and Other Combustible Objects (Grove/Atlantic, 2007) was a New York Times "Editor's Choice," Chicago Tribune "Autumn's Best," and 2007 California Book Award winner. Her next book is her start memoir: Sick volition be published by HarperCollins (May 2018).