Edwidge Danticat, the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, has been named the 2026 recipient of the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature from PEN America and the Vladimir Nabokov Literature Foundation.
The $50,000 award is presented annually to a living author whose body of work — either written in or translated into English — represents the highest level of achievement and is of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship.
Professor Danticat is the author of 18 books, including works of fiction and nonfiction. Some of her most notable publications include Breath, Eyes, and Memory (Soho Press, 1994); Kirk? Krak! (Soho Press, 1995), a National Book Award finalist; and The Farming of Bones (Soho Press, 1998), an American Book Award winner. Her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award and the winner of the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award.
At Columbia, Professor Danticat teaches in the department of African American and African diaspora studies. She has a wide range of research interests, including visual culture studies; Black feminist studies; Black geographies; architecture and urban studies; Caribbean and Latin American history and culture; slavery, abolition, and colonialism; and social and cultural history.
A native of Haiti, Professor Danticat earned her bachelor’s degree in French literature from Barnard College in New York City and her master of fine arts degree in creative writing from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.