The Irish novelist Edna O’Brien has been named as the winner of the PEN/Nabokov award for achievement in international literature, for “the absolute perfection of her prose” and her “powerful voice”.

The author of novels including the celebrated Country Girls trilogy, O’Brien has, said PEN, broken down “social and sexual barriers for women in Ireland and beyond” with her writing. The $50,000 Nabokov prize was created in partnership with the Vladimir Nabokov literary foundation, and awarded for the first time last year, to the Syrian poet Adonis. It is intended to reward “a living author whose body of work, either written in or translated into English, represents the highest level of achievement in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and/or drama, and is of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship”. This year’s judges, who chose O’Brien, were Michael Ondaatje and Diana Abu-Jaber.

O’Brien will be presented with the award on 20 February in New York, alongside the US author Edmund White, who has been revealed as the winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction. Describing White, author of the autobiographical trilogy A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, as “legendary”, and an “LGBT cultural pioneer”, PEN praised his “honest, beautifully wrought and fiercely defiant books”.

The $25,000 Saul Bellow award is for a “living American author whose scale of achievement in fiction, over a sustained career, places him or her in the highest rank of American literature”. Previous winners include Toni Morrison and Philip Roth.