Last week it was announced that Edith Pearlman is to receive the 2011 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. The award recognizes a writer whose body of work excels in short fiction. Pearlman has authored over 250 works of short fiction and nonfiction. Her first collection, Vaquita, was published in 1996. Her fourth collection, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories, was published in January 2011.

“Bernard Malamud expressed the hope that ‘expert practitioners of the short story…will be recognized’ (and) ‘brought emphatically to public attention,’” said Deborah Tannen, chair of the Malamud Award Selection Committee. “With this prize, we hope to bring exactly such long-deserved attention emphatically to Ms. Pearlman’s beautifully crafted and deeply moving short fiction.”

Roxana Robinson, in a New York Times review of Binocular Vision, wrote, “Pearlman writes about the predicaments—odd, wry, funny, and painful—of being human. (Her) prose is smooth and poetic…it’s arresting when, suddenly, almost imperceptibly, she slips emotion into the narrative, coloring it unexpectedly with deep or delicate hues.”

Past winners of the PEN/Malamud Award include John Updike, Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, Joyce Carol Oates, Sherman Alexie, and Lorrie Moore.

Visit the PEN/Faulkner Foundation’s website for more information: www.penfaulkner.org.