PEN America President Jennifer Egan and this year’s judges—Hari Kunzru, George Elliott Clarke, Alexis Okeowo, Lila Azam Zanganeh, and Viet Thanh Ngyuen—have announced that M. NourbeSe Philip is being honored with the 2020 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, in recognition of her esteemed body of work.

The PEN/Nabokov Award is PEN’s most prestigious Career Achievement Award; it is conferred annually 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. Previous winners include Sandra Cisneros, Edna O’Brien, and Adonis.

The award will be conferred at the 2020 PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony, hosted by Seth Meyers on March 2, at The Town Hall in New York City. The Literary Awards Ceremony is a prestigious celebration of literature, honoring leading authors before an audience of the nation’s most distinguished publishers, editors, literary agents, journalists and philanthropists.

NourbeSe Philip is a poet, essayist, novelist and playwright who was born in Tobago and now lives in Toronto. She practiced law in Toronto for seven years before deciding to write fulltime. Philip has published four books of poetry, one novel, and three collections of essays. She was awarded a Pushcart Prize (1981), the Casa de las Americas Prize (Cuba, 1988), the Tradewinds Collective Prize (1988), and was made a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry (1990). Her most recent book of poetry is Zong! (Wesleyan, 2008) is a moving work of experimental verse drawing upon the legal decision Gregson vs Gilbert—a case that dealt with the intentional drowning of 150 Africans by the captain of the slave ship Zong in order to recoup insurance monies for the ship’s owners.

In 2015 Wesleyan published the first US edition of She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Break—first published in Cuba as winner of the Casa de las Americas Prize.