The PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award celebrates writing that exemplifies literary excellence on the subject of physical and biological sciences. The winner receives a cash award of $10,000 and will be honored at the PEN Literary Awards.
The PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award was founded by scientist and author Dr. Edward O. Wilson, activist and actor Harrison Ford, and the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. The inaugural award was conferred in 2011.
Examples of published works that exemplify the quality of writing the award is designed to acknowledge include Rachel Carlson’s Silent Spring (1962), Dr. James Watson’s The Double Helix (1969), Lewis Thomas’s The Lives of a Cell (1978), and Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979).
Past winners: Siddhartha Mukherjee, James Gleick, and Leonard Mlodinow
Judges for 2014: Akiko Busch, Rivka Galchen, and Eileen Pollack
Longlist for 2014:
Frankenstein’s Cat (Scientific American / Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Emily Anthes
The End of Night (Little, Brown and Company), Paul Bogard
Five Days at Memorial (Crown), Sheri Fink
High Price (Harper), Carl Hart
Surfaces and Essences (Basic Books), Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander
Wild Ones (Penguin Press), Jon Mooallem
Gulp (W.W. Norton & Company), Mary Roach
Weird Life (W.W. Norton & Company), David Toomey
What the Dog Knows (Touchstone), Cat Warren
Paleofantasy (W.W. Norton & Company), Marlene Zuk
Stay tuned for the shortlist announcement on June 17. The winners for all the PEN Literary Awards will be announced later this summer.
