The PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship honors an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work—a novel or collection of short stories published in 2007—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.

2008 judges: David Leavitt, Elizabeth Strout, Lily Tuck

The 2007 PEN Literary Awards will be presented in New York on the evening of Monday, May 19, at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. Members of the press are welcome to attend.

For more information, please contact Literary Awards Coordinator Nick Burd: (212) 334-1660, ext. 108, awards@pen.org

Please click here for more information on this award.

This year’s fellow is Dalia Sofer for her novel The Septembers of Shiraz (Ecco).

The judges write in their citation: “In 1981, ‘on a warm autumn day in Tehran,’ Isaac Amin, a Jewish jeweler, is arrested and, thus, his and his family’s lives are changed forever.  While he is imprisoned and tortured, his wife’s pampered world collapses, his daughter takes unaccustomed risks, and, in New York, his son attempts to create another life for himself. In compelling and unadorned prose Dalia Sofer has written a powerful novel that examines the ordeal of a single family in Iran after the fall of the Shah and the injustices and cruelties that they must endure at the hand of the new regime. These injustices along with a stolen ring, a lost teapot, and daily domestic disappointments and betrayals are vividly juxtaposed and convincingly render a moving portrait of both a country in transition and a family in anguish. Yet, in the end, it is particularly and precisely the compassionate description of this family who manages to show—each member in his or her modest way—the indomitable will to survive and the courage to seek a new and better life, reaffirming our trust in the resiliency of the human spirit, that makes The Septembers of Shiraz such a remarkable achievement.”