We are pleased to announce the winners and runners-up of the 2012 PEN Awards, the most comprehensive literary awards program in the country. This year marks PEN’s 90th anniversary. For more than 50 of those years PEN’s Literary Awards program has honored many of the most outstanding voices in literature.

This year, PEN will present 18 awards, fellowships, grants, and prizes—including two awards offered for the first time ever: the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, founded by Barbara Kingsolver and first established in 2000, and the PEN/Steven Kroll Award for text in an illustrated picture book. With the help of its partners and supporters, PEN will confer nearly $175,000 in 2012 to some of the most gifted writers and translators working today.

Award winners and runners-up will be honored at the 2012 PEN Literary Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, October 23, 2012, at CUNY Graduate Center’s Proshansky Auditorium in New York City.

PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, Founded by Barbara Kingsolver ($25,000): 

WINNER: Susan Nussbaum, Good Kings Bad Kings

PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize ($25,000): 

WINNER: Vanessa Veselka, Zazen

PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction ($25,000): 

WINNER: E. L. Doctorow

PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award ($10,000):

WINNER: James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation Awards for an American Playwright in Mid-Career and a Master American Dramatist ($7,500): 

Master American Dramatist: Christopher Durang

American Playwright in Mid-Career: Will Eno and Adam Rapp

PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($5,000):

WINNER: Christopher Hitchens, Arguably

PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000): 

WINNER: Dan Barry, Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game

PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000):

WINNER: Dan Jenkins

PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography ($5,000):

WINNER: Robert K. Massie, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman

PEN Open Book Award ($5,000): 

WINNER: Siddhartha Deb, The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India

PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship ($5,000): 

WINNER: Sarah Dooley, Free Verse

PEN/Steven Kroll Award Honoring the Author of an Illustrated Children’s Book ($5,000): 

WINNER: Patricia C. McKissack, Never Forgotten

PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry ($5,000):

WINNER: Toi Derricotte

PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000):

WINNER: Jen Hofer, Negro Marfil/Ivory Black by Myriam Moscona

PEN/Edward and Lily Tuck Award for Paraguayan Literature ($3,000): 

WINNER: Delfina Acosta, Versos de amor y de locura

PEN Translation Prize ($3,000):

WINNER: Bill Johnston, Stone Upon Stone by Wiesław Myśliwski

PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation:

WINNER: Margaret Sayers Peden

PEN Translation Fund Grants ($1,000-3,000): 

Bernard Adams, Alexander Booth, Brent Edwards, Joshua Daniel Edwin, Musharraf Ali Farooqi, Deborah Garfinkle, Hillary Gulley, Bonnie Huie, Jacquelyn Pope, Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad, Carrie Reed, Nathanaël.

Click here for more information about the prizes, lists of the runners-up, and the winning stories.