Bidart, Wolcott Among 2014 PEN Winners

The PEN American Center announced the winners of the 2014 PEN Awards. Ron Childress's And West is West received the $25,000 Bellwether Prize for Social Engaged Fiction (founded by Barbara Kingsolver), James Wolcott was the recipient of the $10,000 Diamonstein­-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay Award for Critical Mass (Doubleday), and poet Frank Bidart was granted the $5,000 Voelcker Award for Poetry, honoring a "distinguished an growing body of work." The winners will be celebrated at a ceremony on September 29 at the New School in New York City.

For the first time, the winner for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, a $25,000 award, will be announced live at the awards ceremony. Finalists for the award include Anthony Marra for A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (Hogarth), Saïd Sayrafiezadeh for Brief Encounters with the Enemy (The Dial Press), Ian Stansel for Everybody’s Irish (FiveChapters Books), Shawn Vestal for Godforsaken Idaho (Little A/New Harvest), and Hanya Yanagihara for The People in the Trees (Doubleday).

PEN will announce the winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, also a $25,000 prize, in early September.

For a full list of winners, click here.