Celebrated author JohnUpdike added another honor to his list today when he wasnamed the winner of the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction forhis short story collection, "The Early Stories."
The Updike collection, containing most of his stories frombetween 1953 and 1975 and published by Alfred A. Knopf, waschosen ahead of four other finalists by the judges - fellowwriters Ron Carlson, Chitra Divakaruni and Elizabeth Strout.
Carlson described the book as "an astonishing display ofwhat prose should be and what it can do. While there is nosingle galvanizing historical event, nevertheless Updike tellsus what we were like as the 20th century bumped along."
Updike, who has written more than 50 books, including 20novels and collections of short stories, poems and criticism,receives a $15,000 prize.
The 72-year-old Updike's fiction has also won him aPulitzer Prize and the National Book Award among other honors.
The PEN/Faulkner award is billed as the largest annualjuried prize for fiction in the United States.
Each of the four other PEN/Faulkner finalists - FrederickBarthelme for "Elroy Nights" (Counterpoint); ZZ Packer for"Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" (Riverhead); Caryl Phillips for "ADistant Shore" (Knopf), and Tobias Wolff for "Old School"(Knopf) - receives $5,000.
Knopf is a unit of Random House, which is owned byBertelsmann AG.
Riverhead Books is an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), whichis owned by Pearson Plc.
The judges considered more than 350 novels and short storycollections published in 2003 from over 75 publishing houses.
Past winners of the PEN/Faulkner Award, first given in1981, include E.L. Doctorow, John Edgar Wideman (1984 and1991), E. Annie Proulx and Philip Roth (1994 and 2001).