Book Awards

The L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award and The Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award

Justin Cronin has been announced the winner of the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN award for Mary and O'Neill (Dial Press). The Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award is America's best known prize for a distinguished first book of fiction.

Finalists
Peter Orner, Esther Stories (Mariner)

Manil Suri, The Death of Vishnu (HarperCollins)

The runners-up
Carolyn Cooke, The Bostons (Houghton Mifflin)

Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Three Apples Fell From Heaven (Riverhead Books)

The judges for the award were Andrea Barrett, Charles Baxter, and Bret Lott. The award will be presented by Patrick Hemingway, the son of Ernest Hemingway.

The 2001 L.L. Winship/PEN Award, honoring a book by a New England author or about New England, has been won by Elizabeth McCracken for Niagara Falls All Over Again, published by The Dial Press

Finalists
Carolyn Cooke, The Bostons (Houghton Mifflin)

Denis Lehane, Mystic River (William Morrow)

Margot Livesey, Eva Moves the Furniture (Henry Holt and Company)

David McCullough, John Adams (Simon and Schuster).

The judges of the award were authors and PEN New England members Diana der Hovanessian, Pagan Kennedy, Mameve Medwed, David Mehegan, and Susan Quinn

The L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award and The Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award

On April 29, 2001, at the John F. Kennedy Library, Akhil Sharma and Jay Wright received PEN New England's distinguished book prizes.

Founded by Mary Hemingway and presented by Patrick Hemingway, the Ernest Hemingway/PEN Award, a national prize which recognizes the year's best first book-length work of fiction, was awarded to Akhil Sharma for his novel An Obedient Father (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Sharma, who was born in Delhi, India in 1971 and grew up in Edison, New Jersey, now lives in New York City where he is an investment banker.

finalists for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award:

Mohsin Hamid for Moth Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Tom Paine for Scar Vegas and Other Stories (Harcourt Brace)

runners-up

Myla Goldberg for Bee Season (Doubleday)

Elissa Schappel for Use Me (Perennial/HarperCollins)

The judges for the Hemingway/PEN Award 2000 were Elinor Lipman, Jill McCorkle, and Catherine Schine.

The L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, honoring a book by a New England author or with a New England topic or setting, was presented to Jay Wright for Transfigurations: Collected Poems (Louisiana State University Press). His poems from the collection are simultaneously scholarly, historical, intuitive, and emotional.

finalists of the Winship Award:

Joseph J. Ellis for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Knopf)

Evelyn Fox Keller for The Century of the Gene (Harvard University Press)

Stanley Kunitz for The Collected Poems (Norton)

Philip Roth for The Human Stain (Houghton Mifflin)

The judges for the Winship Award 2000 were Jonathan Aaron, Sven Birkerts, Jane Brox, Jane G. Hawes, and Elizabeth McCracken.

The L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award and The Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award

PEN New England is proud to annnounce the 1999 winners of its two major awards. John W. Dower's work in Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II is recognized with the 1999 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Jhumpa Lahiri is the winner of the 1999 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for Interpreter of Maladies.

This year's winner, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II is a remarkable political and cultural history of postwar Japan. With extraordinary insight and attention to detail, he tells of the struggle as a defeated people rebuild under the imposed, confusing politics of a foreign victor.

The Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, America's best-known prize for a distinguished first book of fiction, has been won by Jhumpa Lahiri for her powerful and elegant debut, Interpreter of Maladies, published by Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin. Imbued with sensual details of Indian culture, Lahiri's stories speak with universal eloquence to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner.

PEN-New England has much more information about the 1999 award recipients. To find out more about the awards, including information on how to submit entries for 2000, click here.