Humanities, Research

Robert Hass wins PEN essay award

By Public Affairs

Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States and current Distinguished Professor in Poetry and Poetics at UC Berkeley, has been announced as the winner of the PEN/ Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for his 2012 book What Light Can Do.

The book, which explores such subjects as how we see and treat the earth, the relationship between literature and religion and the work of writers ranging from Anton Chekhov and Wallace Stevens to Cormac McCarthy and Korean poet Ko Un, was one of three in the essay category. The $10,000 prize is awarded “for a book of essays published in 2012 that exemplifies the dignity and esteem that the essay form imparts to literature.”

Runners-up in the essay category were The Story of America , by Jill Lepore, and Waiting for the Barbarians , by Daniel Mendelsohn.

The annual awards from PEN, which calls itself “the world’s leading literary and human rights organization,” recognize literary accomplishment in fields including fiction, poetry, science writing, essays, sports writing, biography, children’s literature, translation and drama. PEN conferred 16 distinct awards, fellowships, grants and prizes in 2013, awarding nearly $150,000 to writers, editors and translators.

The winners will be honored in October at the PEN Literary Awards Ceremony in New York.

All of the winners and runners-up can be found on the PEN website .