PEN/Nabokov award relaunched to promote 'global voices' in US

The $50,000 prize will honour a living international author whose work is ‘of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship’

A new $50,000 (£38,500) literary prize for international authors, intended to recognise the “spirit of Vladimir Nabokov” and described as “a welcome counterbalance to rampant xenophobia and increasingly jingoistic provincialism”, is being launched in the US.

The PEN/Nabokov award, supported by the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation, replaces another award with the same name but a different remit. It will go to a writer born or residing outside the US, either writing in or translated into English to honour “an outstanding body of work over a sustained career”. PEN America said on Thursday that the prize’s judges would be looking for a writer in the field of nonfiction, poetry, drama or fiction whose body of work “evoke[s] to some measure Nabokov’s brilliant versatility and commitment to literature as a search for the deepest truth and the highest pleasure”.

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