PEN Literary Awards for 2011

PEN Literary Awards were announced yesterday.

Among the academic recipients:

Robert Perkinson, a professor of American studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (Metropolitan Books) won the biennial PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith award for a “distinguished book of general nonfiction possessing notable literary merit and critical perspective.”

The accolades continue for Siddhartha Mukherjee, a physician and an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia, who won a Pulitzer earlier this year and has now won the PEN/E.O. Wilson literary science writing award, also for his The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Scribner).

Mark Slouka, who until recently taught at the University of Chicago, won the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the art of the essay for Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations (Graywolf Press).

In translation, Khaled Mattawa, an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan, won the PEN Award for poetry in translation for Adonis: Selected Poems (Yale University Press), a collection from the Syrian poet Adonis (born Ali Ahmad Said Esber) who is perennially given high odds for a Nobel.

In addition, Ibrahim Muhawi, a courtesy professor at the University of Oregon, won a prose translation prize for Journal of an Ordinary Grief, by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (Archipelago Books).

Also, Marcus Gardley, an assistant professor of African-American theater and playwriting at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, won the PEN/Laura Pels Foundation award for an American playwright in mid-career.

Visit the PEN site for a full list of the award winners and runners-up, including the likely many academics who have received translation grants.