Bookplanet: 2005 PEN Lit Awards

Here they are. By the way, PEN people, your announcement sucks. I had to click on other pages to find out what the awards were for. Write it like a PR release, dammit, so newspapers and blogs would like to report it. Give your winners little blurbs about their books, for example. Presumably you want to award them with extra sales. You're supposed to be writers, so do a better writing job, OK?

The PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Awards for Drama: Wallace Shawn (lifetime award) and Dael Orlandersmith (mid-career award)
The PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction: The End of Faith by Sam Harris (I've read it, a great attack on religion, Christianity and Islam). Finalists: A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen; Euclid in the Rain Forest by Joseph Mazur.
The PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn (what a fucking great title). Finalists: Blue Blood by Edward Conlon; Blood Horses by John Jeremiah Sullivan
The PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize: Fatelessness by Imre Kertész, translated by Tim Wilkinson. Finalists: Green Wheat  by Colette, translated by Zack Rogow; The Cello Player by Michael Kurger, translated by Andrew Shields
The PEN Award for Poetry in Translation: Lightduress by Paul Celan, translated by Pierre Joris (this guy also has an excellent Celan selection out, with poetry, prose, and essays by other writers on Celan). Finalists -- Butterfly Valley: A Requiem by Inger Christensen, translated by Susanna Nied; Writing Through: Translations and Variations by Various Authors, translated by Jerome Rothenberg
The PEN/Osterweil Award for Poetry: Forms of Gone by Yerra Sugarman (another lovely title)
The PEN/Nora Magid Award: Southwest Review, edited by Willard Spiegelman (this one honors a lit editor for years of great editorship)
The PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship: Amanda Jenkins ($5,000 for children's and young adult fiction)
The PEN Jerard Fund Award: Stealing Buddha’s Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen

But hey, here's the one to go for. Lotsa cash. Three PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowships for Writers ($35,000 a year for 2 years) honors exceptionally talented fiction writers whose first novel or short stories published in 2004/2005 suggests great promise. Nominations are welcome by January 15, 2006, from writers, editors, literary agents, and members of the literary community. The PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowships have been established by the family of Robert Bingham to commemorate his contribution to literary fiction.

I paid Robert Bingham the ultimate compliment: I googled him. Here's one bit I got: "It's hard to pinpoint a common reaction to Rob Bingham's short stories. There are those who find them dark and funny; some who find them disturbing, even off-putting; some who see their own lives reflected on the page; and some who find them terribly sad. His agent pitches Rob as Scott Fitzgerald for the millennium's end; we think there are overtones of Cheever, Gaitskill, and even 'transgressive' writers like Dennis Cooper."