Edmund White receives PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Career Achievement in American Fiction

By
Jamie Saxon, Office of Communications
on Feb. 8, 2018, 10:34 a.m.

Edmund White, professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts, emeritus, has been awarded the 2018 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Career Achievement in American Fiction.

The biannual award was established in 2009 and is given "to a living American author whose scale of achievement in fiction, over a sustained career, places him or her in the highest rank of American literature."

Edmund White

Edmund White speaks at “Every Voice: A Princeton University Conference for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Ally Alumni” in April 2013.

Photo by
Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy

The panel cited White "for his honest, beautifully wrought and fiercely defiant books, and his body of work including the autobiographical trilogy: 'A Boy's Own Story,' 'The Beautiful Room Is Empty' and 'The Farewell Symphony.'"

White has written more than two dozen books and is perhaps best known for "Genet: A Biography," about French writer Jean Genet, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He also has written the biographies "Marcel Proust: A Life" and "Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel," about the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. He has written a novel about love in the AIDS era called "The Married Man." Other works of fiction include "Chaos," "Hotel de Dream" and "Our Young Man." He has written a book about unconventional Paris called "The Flaneur." His memoir "Inside a Pearl: My Life in Paris" was published in 2014. His new non-fiction book, "That Unpunished Vice: Reading" is forthcoming in June from Bloomsbury Publishing, and he is working on a new novel, "A Saint in Texas." White is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He will receive the award at a ceremony on Feb. 20 in New York City.

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