The founder of Audible, Don Katz has been shortlisted by PEN America as the Business Visionary Honoree for its 2022 Literary Gala for his outstanding contributions to the world of literature and audio storytelling, the organization revealed in a press release. Katz who is an eminent journalist and an author himself founded Audible back in 1995. The company operated independently before it got lapped up by Amazon in 2008.

The company has been at the forefront of the audiobook industry since its inception and is credited to have brought the age-old tradition of storytelling by humans into a mainstream industry with the help of new-age technology. It has come to such that the industry has grown to be worth billions as of now and is projected to show strong growth in the years to come.

Katz also is no novice when it comes to awards and prizes. His work has previously won the prestigious National Magazine Award, an Overseas Press Club Award, and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction. Besides these, Katz was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992 for his work, Home Fires: An Intimate Portrait of One Middle-Class Family in Postwar America.

The PEN gala is going to be an in-person event that would be held on May 23 underneath the blue whale in the majestic Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Others who will be gracing the event include writers, humanitarians, thinkers, and other luminaries.

As for PEN America, it is a non-profit organization that has been championing the cause of free expression in America and elsewhere in the world by propagating literature and human rights. Its members include writers, journalists, translators, editors, publishers, and such. There are more than a hundred PEN centers in the world with PEN America being the largest of them all.

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