Bibliofemme News
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23/03/2005
Winner of PEN/Faulkner Prize Announced
War Trash by Ha Jin, a novel about Chinese prisoners of war under American captivity during the Korean war has won the PEN/Faulkner prize.
The PEN/Faulkner prize was set up in 1981, a legacy of William Faulkner, who when he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950, he gave away the prize money to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers. The prize is awarded to the best work of fiction written by an American author.
Ha Jin who previously won the award in 2000 for his novel Waiting beat off competition from Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, which last week won the National Book Critics Circle award; Edwidge Dandicat's The Dew Breaker; Jerome Charyn's The Green Lantern; and Steve Yarbrough's Prisoners of War. The winner will receive a cheque of €15,000 while the four runners up will each receive €5,000.
Robert Stone and Susan Richards Shreve, co-chairs of PEN/Faulkner praised the War Trash as "a powerful, unflinching story that opens a window on an unknown aspect of a little-known war - the experiences of Chinese POWs held by Americans during the Korean conflict."
Previous winners of the PEN/Faulkner award have included Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Ann Patchett.
Bibliofemme Reviews: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
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