Washington, DC––Edith Pearlman has been selected to receive the 24th annual PEN/Malamud Award. Given annually since 1988 in honor of the late Bernard Malamud, this award recognizes a body of work that demonstrates excellence in the art of short fiction. The announcement was made today by the directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Robert Stone and Susan Richards Shreve, Co-Chairs.
“Bernard Malamud expressed the hope that ‘expert practitioners of the short story, especially those who come rarely if ever to the novel, will be recognized’ so that their work might be ‘brought emphatically to public attention.’ With this prize, we hope to bring exactly such long-deserved attention emphatically to Ms. Pearlman’s beautifully crafted and deeply moving short fiction,” said Deborah Tannen, chair of the Malamud Award Selection Committee.
Edith Pearlman has published more than 250 works of short fiction and short non-fiction in national magazines, literary journals, anthologies, and on-line publications. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Collection,New Stories from the South, and The Pushcart Prize Collection Best of the Small Presses.
Her first collection of stories, Vaquita, won the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature and was published by the University of Pittsburgh University Press in 1996. Her second, Love Among The Greats (Eastern Washington University Press, 2002) won the Spokane Annual Fiction Prize. Her third collection, How to Fall, was published by Sarabande Press in 2005 and won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her fourth collection, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories, was published in January 2011 by Lookout Books, a new imprint at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
The PEN/Malamud Award includes a reading in the 2011/2012 PEN/Faulkner Reading Series at the Folger Shakespeare Library and a prize of $5,000. The selection committee is composed of a panel of PEN/Faulkner Board members. Ms. Pearlman will be given the award on Friday, December 2, 2011 at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Tickets for the event will go on sale September 1, 2011.
Previous PEN/Malamud Award winners include: Edward P. Jones, Nam Le, John Updike, Saul Bellow, George Garrett, Frederick Busch and Andre Dubus, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, Grace Paley, Stuart Dybek and William Maxwell, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, John Barth, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ann Beattie and Nathan Englander, Sherman Alexie, Richard Ford, Junot Diaz, Ursula K. Le Guin, Barry Hannah, Maile Meloy, Richard Bausch, Nell Freudenberger, Lorrie Moore, Tobias Wolff, Adam Haslett, Elizabeth Spencer, Cynthia Ozick Peter Ho Davies, Amy Hempel and Alistair MacLeod.