NEW YORK (AP) — Edmund White and Edna O’Brien are receiving lifetime achievement awards from PEN America.
The literary and human rights organization announced Tuesday that White has won the PEN/Saul Bellow award for American fiction and the Irish-born O’Brien will be given the PEN/Nabokov award for international literature. White, 78, is known for such groundbreaking LGBT works as “A Boy’s Own Story” and “The Beautiful Room is Empty.” O’Brien, 87, has written the novels “The Country Girls” and “Time and Tide,” among numerous other books.
PEN will present the awards during a Feb. 20 ceremony in New York City.