2023 PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award

“As a 52-year-old woman who’s been living in New York and writing comedy for 30 years, there aren’t too many rooms anymore where I feel like a charlatan and a failure, but we found one! It’s tonight! I am vibrating with the energy of a person who’s afraid that the next thing she says will reveal her idiocy!” These were the words of actress, comedian, writer, producer, and playwright Tina Fey, as part of her acceptance speech of the PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award last Thursday in New York City. The ceremony took place in a Broadway theater (The Town Hall), not far from Rockefeller Center, the setting of her hit comedy 30 Rock (2006-2013), created by Fey based on her experiences as head writer for Saturday Night Live (SNL).

Two-time Golden Globe-winning comedy writer and actress Tina Fey will receive the “2023 PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award” at the 50th annual PEN America Literary Awards, taking place in New York on March 2. Fey will be recognized for her comic writing legacy, as the fifth recipient to receive the award honoring a groundbreaking writer whose transformative work inspires audiences in the spirit of the late director Mike Nichols Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), The Graduate (1967), Silkwood (1983), Working Girl (1988), Postcards from the Edge (1990) and Closer (2004) …) “It’s been a lifelong dream to have my name associated in any way with the great Mike Nichols,” Fey said in a statement.