Sandra Cisneros to receive PEN/Nabokov Award for international literature
Cisneros is the third author to win the annual award, after Syrian poet Adonis in 2017 and Irish novelist Edna O'Brien in 2018.
Sandra Cisneros, the Mexican American novelist whose books “The House on Mango Street” and “Woman Hollering Creek” are widely considered contemporary classics of American literature, has won the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.
Cisneros is the third author to win the annual award, after Syrian poet Adonis in 2017 and Irish novelist Edna O’Brien in 2018.
In a telephone interview with The Times, Cisneros said she was surprised to receive the award from the literary foundation PEN America.
“It’s astonishing,” she said. “I truly don’t feel that I’ve arrived at where I want to be yet. I feel that I’m just getting started.”
The PEN/Nabokov Award, a collaboration between PEN America and the Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation, is given each year to “a living author whose body of work, either written in or translated into English, represents the highest level of achievement in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and/or drama, and is of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship,” according to PEN America’s website
