Cynthia Ozeck Wins Two Lifetime Achievement Awards

Posted on April 28, 2008

At the age of 80, Cynthia Ozeck has just won two prestigious lifetime achievement awards: the PEN/Malamud short fiction prize and the PEN/Nabokov award for originality and craftmanship.

The $5,000 PEN/Malamud prize for short fiction, and the $20,000 PEN/Nabokov award for "enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship" were judged by different panels but agreed to present the honours in tandem. "A prodigious imagination, a relentless intellect, an endless appetite for investigation and truth telling: All of these we have come to expect from her work," PEN/Nabokov judges Mary Gordon, Brian Boyd and Richard Price wrote in their citation.
"No American writer working today is as close in soul and style to Bernard Malamud as Cynthia Ozick," PEN/Malamud judge Alan Cheuse wrote, "and no American writer working today is more distinctive in everything she does on the page". Peter Ho Davies, whose books include Equal Love, was named a co-winner of the Malamud prize.

Known as a "writer's writer" which pundits define as "high respect plus low book sales," Ozick is becoming more well-known with the public. Her last book, Heir to the Glimmering World, sold more than 30,000 copies. She also made the shortlist for the Man Booker International prize in 2005.