2010 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Awards

For Immediate Release: March 3, 2010
Further information: Rachel Day (617) 514-1662, rachel.day@jfklfoundation.org

 

BOSTON, MA – PEN New England today announced that Brigid Pasulka has won the 2010 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a distinguished first book of fiction for A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Patrick Hemingway, the son of Nobel Prize-winning writer Ernest Hemingway, will present the prestigious literary award to Pasulka on Sunday, March 28, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, the world’s principal center for research on the life and work of Ernest Hemingway. National Book Awards-Finalist Dorothy Allison will serve as the ceremony’s keynote speaker. 

The two Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award finalists are C. E. Morgan for All the Living(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Abraham Verghese for Cutting for Stone (Knopf).  Two writers will receive honorable mention:  Mary Beth Keane for The Walking People(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and Lydia Peelle for Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (HarperCollins).

Judges for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award this year were acclaimed fiction writers Julia Glass, Michael Lowenthal and Gail Tsukiyama.

Pasulka 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. Pasulka and competition finalists and honorable mentions receive Ucross Residency Fellowships at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, a retreat for artists and writers.

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. Past recipients of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award include Edward P. Jones, Dagoberto Gilb, Susan Power, Chang-Rae Lee, Ha Jin, Charlotte Bacon, Rosina Lippi, Jhumpa Lahiri, Akhil Sharma, Justin Cronin, Gabriel Brownstein, Jennifer Haigh, Chris Abani, Yiyun Li, Ben Fountain, Joshua Ferris and Michael Dahlie.
 
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis brought the presentation of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award to the Kennedy Library. The Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library spans Hemingway’s entire career, and contains ninety percent of existing Hemingway manuscript materials.

The ceremony will also honor writers Anne Sanow, Meg Kearney, and Elyssa East as recipients of the 2010 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Awards, given annually to a New England author or a book with a New England setting. Ms. Sanow is being honored in the fiction category for Triple Time (University of Pittsburgh Press); Ms. Kearney in the poetry category for Home by Now (Four Way Books); and Ms. East in the non-fiction category for Dogtown (Free Press/ Simon & Schuster). Judges for the Winship Awards this year were authors Dorothy Allison (fiction), Tim Seibles (poetry), and Michael Steinberg (non-fiction).

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, Anita Shreve, Stanley Kunitz, Leo Damrosch, Jennifer Haigh, K.C. Frederick, Sebastian Junger, Louise Glick, Rishi Reddi, Kristen Laine, Ann Killough, Nancy Pearson, Patrick Tracey and Margot Livesey.

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, PEN New England, Cerulli Associates, the Friends of the Ernest Hemingway Collection, The Boston Globe Foundation, the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/Society, and the Ucross Foundation sponsor the presentation of the awards. 

PEN New England provides a focal point for New England’s literary community, sponsors literary events, helps advance a culture of literature in New England and defend free expression everywhere. It is the largest of three regional branches of PEN American Center, which in turn is part of International PEN, the only worldwide organization of writing professionals.

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is the world’s repository for the majority of Ernest Hemingway’s papers. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis described Mary Hemingway’s gift of Ernest Hemingway’s papers to the Kennedy Library as helping “to fulfill our hopes that the Library will become a center for the study of American civilization, in all its aspects.” The Hemingway Foundation/Society, PEN New England, The Boston Globe, and the Kennedy Library ensure that the judging and presentation of the award remain in New England. For more information on the Hemingway Collection at the Kennedy Library, visit www.jfklibrary.org

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is a presidential library administered by the National Archives and Records Administration and is supported, in part, by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, a non-profit organization.

The ceremony will take place on Sunday, March 28 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. and is free and open to the public. Those interested in attending should call the Kennedy Presidential Library at (617) 514-1643.