PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay is awarded by the PEN America (formerly PEN American Center) to an author for a book of original collected essays.^[1] The award was founded by PEN Member and author Barbaralee Diamonstein and Carl Spielvogel,^[2] former New York Times columnist, "to preserve the dignity and esteem that the essay form imparts to literature."^[3] The winner receives a cash award of $10,000.^[1]

The award was on hiatus from 2005 to 2010.^[1]

The award is one of many PEN awards sponsored by International PEN affiliates in over 145 PEN centres around the world. The PEN American Center awards have been characterized as being among the "major" American literary prizes.^[4]

Award winners

PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay winners

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
1990	Bernard Knox	Essays Ancient and Modern	Winner
1991	Martha Nussbaum	Love's Knowledge	Winner
1992	David Morris	The Culture of Pain	Winner
1993	Frederick Crews	The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy	Winner
1994	Stanley Fish	There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and it's a Good Thing, Too	Winner
1995	John Brinckerhoff Jackson	A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time	Winner
1996	Thomas Nagel	Other Minds	Winner
1997	Cynthia Ozick	Fame and Folly	Winner
1998	Adam Hochschild	Finding the Trapdoor	Winner
1999	Marilynne Robinson	The Death of Adam	Winner
2000	Annie Dillard	For the Time Being	Winner
2001	David Quammen	The Boilerplate Rhino	Winner
2002	David Bromwich	Skeptical Music	Winner
2003	William H. Gass	Test of Time	Winner
2004	Stewart Justman	Seeds of Mortality	Winner
2011	Mark Slouka	Essays from the Nick of Time	Winner	[5]
2012	Christopher Hitchens	Arguably	Winner	[6][7]
2013	Robert Hass	What Light Can Do	Winner	[8][9]
	Jill Lepore	The Story of America	Shortlist	[10][11]
	Daniel Mendelsohn	Waiting for the Barbarians	Shortlist	[10][11]
2014	James Wolcott	Critical Mass	Winner	[12][13][14]
	Rebecca Solnit	The Faraway Nearby	Shortlist	[15]
	David Sedaris	Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls	Shortlist	[15]
	Janet Malcolm	Forty-One False Starts	Shortlist	[15]
2015	Ian Buruma	Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadow of War	Winner	[16][17]
	David Bromwich	Moral Imagination	Shortlist	[18]
	Charles D’Ambrosio	Loitering	Shortlist	[18]
	Leslie Jamison	The Empathy Exams	Shortlist	[18]
	Angela Pelster	Limber	Shortlist	[18]
2016	Ta-Nehisi Coates	Between the World and Me	Winner	[19][20][21]
	Renata Adler	After the Tall Timber: Collected Non-Fiction	Shortlist	[22]
	Susan Howe	The Quarry	Shortlist	[22][23]
	Marilynne Robinson	The Givenness of Things: Essays	Shortlist	[22]
	David L. Ulin	Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles	Shortlist	[22]
2017	Angela Morales	The Girls In My Town: Essays	Winner	[24][25][26]
2018	Ursula K. Le Guin	No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters	Winner	[27][28][29][30]
2019	Michelle Tea	Against Memoir	Winner	[31][32][33]
2020	Deborah Fleming	Resurrection of the Wild	Winner	[34][35]
	Eve Babitz	I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz	Shortlist	[36]
	Leslie Jamison	Make It Scream, Make It Burn: Essays	Shortlist	[36]
	Emily Nussbaum	I Like To Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution	Shortlist	[36]
	Jia Tolentino	Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion	Shortlist	[36]
2021	Barbara Ehrenreich	Had I Known: Collected Essays	Winner	[37][38]
2022	Margaret Renkl	Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South	Winner	[39][40][41]
	Hanif Abdurraqib	A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance	Shortlist	[42][43]
	André Aciman	Homo Irrealis: Essays	Shortlist	[42][43]
	Teju Cole	Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time	Shortlist	[42][43]
	Ann Patchett	These Precious Days: Essays	Shortlist	[42][43]
2023	Judith Thurman	A Left-Handed Woman	Winner	[44]
	Jhumpa Lahiri	Translating Myself and Others	Shortlist	[45]
	Peter Orner	Still No Word From You	Shortlist	[45]
	David Sedaris	Happy-Go-Lucky	Shortlist	[45]
	Alison Townsend	The Green Hour: A Natural History of Home	Shortlist	[45]