Mukherjee, Sundaram On Long List Of Pen-E.O. Wilson Awards

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Siddhartha Mukherjee and Anjam Sundaram are among list of authors chosen in the long list for the 2017 PEN America Literary Awards. Mukherjee’s “The Gene: An Intimate History” was among books chosen for the $10,000 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, while Sundaram’s “Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship” was among those chosen for the $10,000 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.

The finalists for all book awards will be announced Jan. 18, while the winners will be announced Feb. 22, except for those the awards for debut fiction and essay as well as for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the PEN/Nabokov Award, which will be named live at the 2017 PEN Literary Awards Ceremony on March 27 at The New School’s John L. Tishman Auditorium in NYC.

Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher. He is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, according to his bio data on Amazon. A former Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford (where he received a PhD studying cancer-causing viruses) and from Harvard Medical School. His laboratory focuses on discovering new cancer drugs using innovative biological methods. Mukherjee trained in cancer medicine at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute of Harvard Medical School and was on the staff at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

He has published articles and commentary in such journals as Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Neuron and the Journal of Clinical Investigation and in publications such as the New York Times and the New Republic. His work was nominated for Best American Science Writing, 2000 (edited by James Gleick). He lives in Boston and New York with his wife, Sarah Sze, an artist, and with his daughter, Leela.

An award-winning journalist, Sundaram’s writing has appeared in Granta, The Guardian, the New York Times, The Washington Post, Observer and Foreign Policy. His war correspondence from the Central African Republic won a Frontline Club award in 2015, and his reporting on Congo won a Reuters prize in 2006. His work has also been shortlisted for the Prix Bayeux and the Kurt Schork award. Anjan graduated from Yale University, his website says.

Sundaram was born in Ranchi, India, and grew up between India and Dubai. He studied at Rishi Valley School in India, and Dubai Gem Private School in Dubai. After enrolling in the engineering program at IIT Chennai, he moved to the United States and graduated from Yale University in 2005. Sundaram earned a master’s degree in mathematics as an undergraduate at Yale studying abstract algebra under the legendary mathematician Serge Lang.