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 award is also supported by James and Cathy Stone. 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).
Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition, Patricia S. Churchland (W. W. Norton & Company)
Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves, Frans de Waal (W. W. Norton & Company)
On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galapagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden, Elizabeth Hennessy (Yale University Press)
The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, Dahr Jamail (New Press)
Losing Earth: A Recent History, Nathaniel Rich (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bill Bryson (Doubleday)
Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition, Patricia S. Churchland (W. W. Norton & Company)
Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves, Frans de Waal (W. W. Norton & Company)
Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience, Michael S. A. Graziano (W. W. Norton & Company)
On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galapagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden, Elizabeth Hennessy (Yale University Press)
The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, Dahr Jamail (New Press)
The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains, Joseph LeDoux (Viking)
Hot Carbon: Carbon 14 and a Revolution in Science, John F. Marra (Columbia University Press)
Losing Earth: A Recent History, Nathaniel Rich (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, David Wallace-Wells (David Wallace-Wells)
The winner will be celebrated at the 2020 PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony on March 2 at the Town Hall in New York City and hosted by Seth Meyers.
2020 Judges
This year’s PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award judges are Diane Ackerman, Rivka Galchen, and Priyamvada Natarajan.
Diane Ackerman is the author of 25 works of poetry and nonfiction, including three New York Times bestsellers: The Human Age (W.W. Norton & Company, 2015), which received the Henry David Thoreau Prize; A Natural History of the Senses (Vintage, 1991), which inspired a PBS NOVA series; and The Zookeeper’s Wife (W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), which received the Orion Book Award. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Smithsonian, National Geographic, and elsewhere. She lives in Ithaca, N.Y., and has the unusual distinction of having a molecule named after her—dianeackerone—a sex pheromone in crocodilians.
Rivka Galchen is an award-winning fiction writer and journalist. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker and has also written for The New York Times Magazine, The London Review of Books, and other publications. She is the author of Atmospheric Disturbances (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), American Innovations (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) and Little Labors (New Directions, 2016).
Priyamvada Natarajan is the author of the critically acclaimed book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas that Reveal the Cosmos (Yale University Press, 2017). She is an astrophysicist and professor at Yale University, with a joint appointment in the Astronomy and Physics departments. She has made seminal contributions to our current understanding of the formation and growth of black holes and of the nature of dark matter. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences and a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Past Winners
Ben Goldfarb, Lindsey Fitzharris, Luke Dittrich, Lauren Redniss, Joshua Horwitz, Dr. Carl Hart, Leonard Mlodinow, James Gleick, and Siddhartha Mukherjee.
