The PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced yesterday that Philip Roth is the winner of the 2007 Award for Fiction for his novel Everyman (Houghton Mifflin). He received fifteen thousand dollars. The judges for the award, given to honor the most distinguished work of fiction by a U.S. writer published during the previous year, were John Dufresne, Debra Magpie Earling, and David Gates. Roth, who also received the award in 2001 for The Human Stain (Houghton Mifflin) and in 1994 for Operation Shylock (Simon & Schuster), is the first writer to win the award three times.
The four finalists are Charles D’Ambrosio for The Dead Fish Museum (Knopf), Deborah Eisenberg for Twilight of the Superheroes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Amy Hempel for The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (Scribner), and Edward P. Jones for All Aunt Hagar’s Children (Amistad). They each received five thousand dollars.
Roth has been the recipient of more than a dozen major literary awards, including two National Book Awards in fiction—in 1995 for Sabbath’s Theater (Houghton Mifflin, 1995) and in 1960 for Goodbye, Columbus (Houghton Mifflin, 1959)—and the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for American Pastoral (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). His next book, Exit Ghost, will be published this fall by Houghton Mifflin.
