PEN American Center, the nation's preeminent association of writers, editors and translators, has announced that acclaimed novelist Philip Roth will be the first recipient of a major new literary prize, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. The award, selected by a panel of three PEN members or similarly qualified persons, 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. Mr. Roth will receive the PEN/Saul Bellow Award at the 2007 PEN Literary Awards ceremony on May 21, 2007.