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The PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir ($1,000)
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The PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir honors
a distinguished book-length memoir (the author’s first) by an American
writer.
The PEN/Martha Albrand Awards were created through a bequest from Katrin Lamon, who wrote under the name Martha Albrand.
2005 judges: Jo Ann Beard, Lynn Freed, and Ilan Stavans
Please click here for more information on the award. |
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2005 Awardees
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Presented by Jo Ann Beard
Winner:
Nick Flynn: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (W.W. Norton & Company)
Nick Flynn’s father is an erratic would-be-poet, a drunk, a con man
convicted for bank robbery, and a down-and-out homeless person in
Boston who lives in ATM lobbies. His son works as a shelter caseworker.
His search for the lost paternal figure produces a memoir about
misconstrued domestic relationships that is as painful as it is
inspiring. Flynn’s style is raw, succinct, and honest. He builds his
narrative through short pungent chapters that make Another Bullshit
Night in Suck City a wrenching tour through the urban labyrinth we
carry within. This is also a story about a mother who tries to keep her
two boys afloat in Scituate, Massachusetts, while their father becomes
a ghost and as she herself descends into suicidal depression. But the
protagonists are Flynn senior and junior. Their intersecting journeys
don't feel manipulated for structural purposes. This book serves as
lesson in the art of autobiography.
Finalists:
Edward Conlon: Blue Blood (Riverhead)
A fourth generation cop’s detailed and lively account of what it is to
come up through the ranks of the New York Police Department, from
rookie to detective. Edward Conlon recreates the Job through vivid,
richly textured accounts of pursuit and arrest, of precinct politics,
of his own family history, intricately linked with that of the police
department, and-- finally--of his tour of duty at Ground Zero in the
days and weeks following September 11. An excellent memoir by a gifted
and insightful writer.
John Jeremiah Sullivan: Blood Horses (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
In this lyrical montage of memoir, history, meditation, picture
gallery, and reportage, John Jeremiah Sullivan considers the ancient
and abiding bond between man and horse. The son of a veteran
sportswriter, Sullivan reports on the two years he spent educating
himself about horses and horse racing. Along the way, he pauses to
consider such subjects as bloodlines, well-diggers, warfare, social
class, Indo-European languages, Cortés in Mexico, Saudis on 9/11--all
related, more or less, to the role of the horse in man’s history. After
reading this glorious book, one can never quite consider that history
in the same way again.
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