PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction: Deborah Eisenberg (2011)

This event took place on May 7th 2011 at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Washington, DC—Deborah Eisenberg’s The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (Picador) was selected as the winner of the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. 

The judges—Laura Furman, William Kittredge, and Helena Maria Viramontes—considered approximately 320 novels and short story collections by American authors published in the US during the 2010 calendar year. Submissions came from over 125 publishing houses, including small and academic presses. There is no fee for a publisher or writer to submit a book.

The honored book, The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg, brings together four volumes of Eisenberg’s work: Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82nd Airborne, All Around Atlantis, and Twilight of the Superheroes, which was a PEN/Faulkner Finalist in 2007. .

The PEN/Faulkner Award is America’s largest peer juried prize for fiction in the United States.  As winner, Eisenberg receives $15,000.  Each of the four finalists—Jennifer Egan for A Visit From The Goon Squad(Knopf); Jaimy Gordon for Lord of Misrule(McPherson & Co.); Eric Puchner for Model Home(Scribner); and  Brad Watson for Aliens in The Prime of Their Lives  (W.W. Norton)—receives $5,000.

All five authors were honored during the 31st anniversary PEN/Faulkner Award Ceremony.

Deborah Eisenberg was born November 20, 1945, and is an American short-story writer, actress and teacher. A professor of writing at Columbia University, Eisenberg is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of honors including the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writer's Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Eisenberg has published four collections of stories: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). Her first two story collections were republished in one volume as The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg (1997). All four volumes were reprinted in 2010 in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg (2010).