2009 PEN Literary Awards

In 2009, PEN awarded 23 prizes to writers at work in a variety of genres. From fiction and drama to translation, biography, and poetry, the works of this year’s award recipients are about power play and politics, and the habitation and annihilation of structure. Below find excerpts from this year’s winning works, as well as audio recordings and photos from the 2008 Literary Awards Ceremony.

AUDIO & PHOTO GALLERIES

Roberto Bolaño: 2666
translated by Natasha Wimmer

When Rosa fell asleep he took off her high-heeled shoes and covered her with a blanket. [More]

Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean Luc-Godard
by Richard Brody

Though few young filmmakers would imitate Breathless, many would imitate Godard himself, such as Breathless revealed him to be: an artistically voracious autodidact devoted fanatically to the history of cinema. [More]

The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century
by Steve Coll

Al-Thaghr sat on several dozen arid acres lined by eucalyptus trees, whose branches were twisted by winds from the Red Sea. [More]

Paul Yoon: Once the Shore
from One Story, edited by Hannah Tinti

On this particular evening the woman told the waiter about her husband’s hair: parted always on his right and combed finely so that each strand shone like amber from the shower he took prior to meeting her for their evening walks. “There was a time,” the woman said, “when he bathed for me and me alone.” [More]

An Aquarium
by Jeffrey Yang

We have yet to understand
the mystery of the sponge. A phylum
unto itself, sponge
fossils found
in Doushantuo phosphorite
are the most ancient of
multicellular animals . . . 

[More]

Knockemstiff
by Donald Ray Pollock

Tina Elliot is leaving tomorrow, heading off with Boo Nesser to shack up in a trailer next to a Texas oil field, and I feel as bad as the time my mother died. [More]

A Glimpse Is All I Can Stand
by Carol Lynch Williams

Mama she say shh.
She say shhh.
She say, quiet baby.

[More]

Beauty of the Father
by Nilo Cruz

Lorca: Five o’clock in the afternoon. The hour that bullfighters get killed. (Writes a note) There was no death today at five o’clock in the afternoon. No, no death reported. Perhaps there was a wound. But there is always a wound in the world, open and exposed for everybody to see, and a little sand bucket of tears by the edge of the sea. [More]

Marie Étienne: King of a Hundred Horsemen
translated by Marilyn Hacker

Marie Étienne, born in Menton in the Alpes-Maritimes, spent her childhood in Indochina, in what is now Vietnam . . . [More]

PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories
The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories recognizes excellence in the short story. This year's winners include Junot Diaz, Nadine Gordimer, Ha Jin, as well as many new voices. [More]

Cormac McCarthy received the 2009 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction.

Cities of the Plains

In the mountains they saw deer in the headlights and in the headlights the deer were pale as ghosts and as soundless. They turned their red eyes toward this unreckoned sun and sidled and grouped and leapt the bar ditch by ones and twos. [More]

All the Pretty Horses

In his sleep he could hear the horses stepping among the rocks and he could hear them drink from the shallow pools in the dark where the rocks lay smooth and rectilinear as the stones of ancient ruins and the water from their muzzles... [More]

The Road

By evening they at least were dry. They studied the pieces of map but he’d little notion of where they were. He stood at a rise in the road and tried to take his bearings in the twilight. [More]

Sam Shepard received the 2009 Pels Foundation Award for Drama.

Buried Child

Tilden: You shoulda worried about me then.

Dodge: Why’s that? You didn’t do anything down there, did you?

Tilden: I didn’t do anything.

Dodge: Then why should I have worried about you?

Tilden: Because I was lonely.

Dodge: Because you were lonely?

Tilden: Yeah. I was more lonely than I’ve ever been before.

Dodge: Why was that?

[More]


States of Shock

Stubbs: When I was hit there was no sound.

Colonel: I realize that! You’re jumping the gun. That’s not important now. What I’m trying to figure out is the exact configuration. The positions of each element. A catastrophe has to be examined from every possible angle. It has to be studied coldly, from the outside, without investing a lot of stupid emotion.

Stubbs: I was hit in silence.

[More]

Michael Henry Heim received the 2009  Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation.

Thomas Mann: Death in Venice
translated by Michael Henry Heim

Gustav Aschenbach or von Aschenbach, as he had officially been known since his fiftieth birthday, set out alone from his residence in Munich’s Prinzregentenstrasse on a spring afternoon in 19..—a year that for months had shown so ominous a countenance to our continent—with the intention of taking an extended walk. [More]