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PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers ($35,000)
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The PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers honors an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work—a novel or collection of short stories published in 2006—represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise. The winner receives a cash award of $35,000, a stipend intended to permit a significant degree of leisure in which to pursue a second work of literary fiction. The Robert Bingham Fellow is also encouraged to become an active participant in the PEN community and its programs
2007 Judges: Yiyun Li, Will Heinrich, and Maureen Howard.
The PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowships have been established in memory of Robert Bingham, who died in 1999 at the age of 33, to commemorate his love of literature and his contribution to literary fiction. Bingham was the author of two well-received books (a novel and short story collection, both published by Doubleday) and served as the editor of the avant-garde magazine Open City. Christopher Coake, Carolyn Cooke, Jonathan Safran Foer, Will Heinrich, Matthew Klam, Manil Suri, and Monique Truong have all been Bingham fellows.
The 2007 PEN Literary Awards will presented in New York on the evening
of Monday, May 21 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.
For more information contact Nick Burd: (212) 334-1660, ext. 108, nick@pen.org
Please click here for more information on this award.
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2007 Awardee
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This year’s PEN/Robert Bingham Fellow is Janna Levin for her novel A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (Knopf).
From
the judges’ citation: “Early in Janna Levin’s brilliant first novel…the
reader is asked, ‘Don’t our stories matter?’ The question is
tremendous, challenging the premise of fiction itself and the choice of
the stories she tells, the lives of two great scientists, Kurt Godel
and Alan Turing, their extraordinary achievements and their personal
tragedies. Levin, who is a physicist and astronomer, does not exclude
her own story. She’s our Virgil who takes us from the Viennese café of
1931 in which Godel, young and untried, has already come upon his
incompleteness theory, to the little hut in Bletchley Park where Alan
Turing breaks Germany’s Enigma code, and to Levin’s own prospect of
this day in New York in the 21st century. ‘Craving an amulet, a jewel,
a reason, a purpose, a truth.’ The writer’s voice is always present
with authority and wonder, observing, listening in, unafraid of her own
inventions. Levin’s imagery is beautiful, often as elegant as solutions
in her home field of mathematics, and always as clear as the answer we
seek in the proof of a fine story.” |
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Finalists
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Tony D’Souza
for Whiteman (Harcourt)
Katherine Min
for Secondhand World (Knopf)
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