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Cormac McCarthy has won the biennial PEN/Saul Bellow award for lifetime achievement in American literature, which comes with a $25,000 (£16,600) prize.
The author of The Road and No Country for Old Men is the second writer to be awarded the prize, which goes to "a distinguished living American author of fiction whose body of work in English possesses qualities of excellence, ambition, and scale of achievement over a sustained career which place him or her in the highest rank of American literature".
Philip Roth, who won the inaugural prize in 2007, sat on the judging panel alongside Claudia Roth Pierpont and Benjamin Taylor.
PEN announced several other literary prizes on Tuesday (5th May), including the $35,000 Robert Bingham Fellowship for a debut fiction writer, won by Donald Ray Pollack for his collection Knockemstiff and the $10,000 John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, which went to Steve Coll for The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century.