First PEN/Saul Bellow award goes to Roth

Literary awards are old news for Philip Roth, but his latest honor is truly special: the first PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, a $40,000 prize named for the late Nobel laureate and one of Roth’s closest friends and literary heroes.

“The initial selection of Philip Roth sets a very high standard and bodes well for the establishment of this prize as one of the preeminent awards of American literature,” historian and recent PEN American president Ron Chernow said in a statement issued by the U.S. center for the international writers organization.

The 74-year-old Roth, known for such novels as “Portnoy’s Complaint” and “American Pastoral,” has won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize. He recently became the first three-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner prize, chosen for “Everyman,” a novel about illness and mortality inspired in part by the 2005 death of Bellow.

The new PEN award, established with the cooperation of the Bellow estate, will be given every two years and was made possible by a grant from the author and philanthropist Evelyn Stefansson Nef. It will be voted on by a panel of three PEN members or “similarly qualified persons,” and goes to a “distinguished living American author of fiction whose body of work in English possesses qualities of excellence, ambition, and scale of achievement over a sustained career which place him or her in the highest rank of American literature.”