The literary nonprofit PEN America announced the winners of its annual literary awards at a ceremony Tuesday evening in New York.
Cannupa Hanska Luger won the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, given to “an outstanding work with the promise of enduring influence,” for his art book SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide.
The $5,000 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography went to Nicholas Boggs for Baldwin: A Love Story, his biography of author James Baldwin. Last week, Boggs’ book won the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for the best first book in any genre.
Peter Beinart won the $10,000 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction for Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, while Jamaica Kincaid took home the $15,000 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Putting Myself Together: Writing 1973-.
The $10,000 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award went to Pria Anand for The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains, and Justin Haynes won the $10,000 PEN Open Book Award, given to “an exceptional book-length work of any literary genre by an author of color,” for his novel Ibis.
Jared Lemus was awarded the $25,000 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection for Guatemalan Rhapsody, and Minna Zallman Proctor took home the $3,000 PEN Translation Prize for The Leucothea Dialogues, written by Cesare Pavese.
The ceremony was hosted by comedian and actor Murray Hill, who in his opening remarks, said, ““Governments are doing everything they can to squash diversity in our schools, our libraries, our businesses, and our halls of power, to prevent the exchange of new perspectives and the celebration of—and even the acknowledgement of—multiculturalism. But we all know that diversity is our greatest strength.”
A full list of this year’s winners is available at the PEN America website.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
