April 2, 2006
2006 PEN/Hemingway and Winship Awards
On Sunday, April 2, PEN/New England and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum honored Yiyun Li as the 2006 recipient of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a distinguished first book of fiction for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Random House).
Patrick Hemingway, the son of Nobel Prize-winning writer Ernest Hemingway, will present the prestigious literary award at the April 2nd ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Joyce Carol Oates served as the ceremony's keynote speaker. Ernest Hemingway's papers are archived at the Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. The late Mary Hemingway, the wife of Ernest Hemingway, founded the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 1976 to honor her late husband and draw attention to first books of fiction. Judges for the award this year were acclaimed fiction writers Charlotte Bacon and Bernard Cooper, both winners of the Hemingway/PEN award for their own first books, and Rosellen Brown.
Finalists in the competition for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award were Douglas Trevor for The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space (University of Iowa Press) and Daniel Alarcon for War by Candlelight (HarperCollins). Runners-up were Jess Row for The Train to Lo Wu (The Dial Press) and Karen Olsson for Waterloo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Yiyun Li will receive an $8,000 prize from the Hemingway Foundation and a one week residency in The Distinguished Visiting Writers Series at the University of Idaho's MFA Program in Creative Writing. Li and competition finalists and runners-up received Ucross Residency Fellowships at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, a retreat for artists and writers.
The ceremony also honored writers Stanley Kunitz, Leo Damrosch, and Jennifer Haigh as recipients of the 2006 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award, given annually to an author from New England or to an author whose writing includes a New England setting. Mr. Kunitz was recognized in the poetry category for The Wild Braid (W.W. Norton), Mr. Damrosch was honored in the non-fiction category for Jean Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Houghton Mifflin), and Ms. Haigh was honored in the fiction category for Baker Towers (HarperCollins). Judges for the awards this year were authors Rhina Espaillat, John Skoyles and Ted Weesner. The L.L. Winship/ PEN New England Award was established by The Boston Globe in 1975 to honor long-time Boston Globe editor Laurence L. Winship. It has been awarded in the past to E.B. White, Andre Dubus, Susan Cheever, Tracy Kidder, Mary Oliver, Susan Quinn, Jill Ker Conway, Jan Swafford, and Anita Shreve.
With a writing career that spans 25 years, Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 70 books including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, literary criticism and essays. Her writing has earned many awards including the National Book Award for her novel them (1969), the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy Institute of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the O'Henry Prize for Continued Achievement in the Short Story, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Lifetime Achievement Award in Fiction, the Rea Award for Short Story, and in 1978, membership in the American Academy Institute. She also has been nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
For further information about the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award or the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award, contact PEN New England at 617.349.8113. For further information on the award ceremony and reservations, contact the Forum Coordinator at the Kennedy Library, Amy Macdonald, at 617.514.1645.