Christopher Durang, Will Eno, Adam Rapp Win PEN Literary Awards

Playwrights Christopher Durang, Will Eno and Adam Rapp are honored along with authors Susan Nussbaum and Vanessa Veselka

Playwrights Christopher Durang, Will Eno and Adam Rapp are among the recipients of the 2012 PEN Literary Awards, announced Wednesday.

Getty ImagesDurang (left), a 2006 Pulitzer Prize finalist for "Miss Witherspoon," received PEN's Master American Dramatist award, which carries a $7,500 prize.

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Durang was nominated for a Tony Award in 1978 for Best Book of a Musical for "A History of the American Film." His off-Broadway works include "Sister Mary Ignatius," "The Marriage of Bette and Boo" and "Betty's Summer Vacation,"  he received Obie Awards for all three works. As an actor, Durang was a regular in the short-lived 2001 Kristin Chenoweth series, "Kristin," playing the Rev. Thornhill.

Durang's most recent play, "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike," starring David Hyde Pierce and  Sigourney Weaver, is scheduled to open at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on Nov. 12.

Will Eno and Adam Rapp shared PEN awards for American Playwright in Mid-Career, which also carries a $7,500 prize.

Eno was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Drama for his play "Thom Pain (based on nothing)." In his rave review of the one-man play (which starred James Urbaniak), New York Times critic Charles Isherwood called Eno "a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation."

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Rapp's play "Red Light Winter," was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. His other works include "Stone Cold Dead Serious," "The Metal Children" and "Dreams of Flying Dreams of Falling."  His latest play, "Through the Yellow Hour," opens at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in New York on Sept. 27.

Among the other winners of PEN Literary Awards are Susan Nussbaum, author of "Good Kings Bad Kings," who received the $25,000 Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, which goes to the writer of an unpublished novel that addresses issues of social justice.

Vanessa Veselka, author of "Zansen," received the $25,000 Robert W. Bingham Prize, which goes to a fiction writer whose debut work, published in 2011, "represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise."

The awards ceremony will be held on Oct. 23 at the CUNY Graduate Center's Proshansky Auditorium in New York City.

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