The nonprofit group PEN America has announced the finalists for its annual literary awards, which showcase “excellence from literary superstars and new voices alike.”
Contending for the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, which honors a book that “has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting influence,” are Brandon Hobson for the novel The Devil Is a Southpaw, Joy Williams for the story collection The Pelican Child, Yiyun Li for the memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow, Cannupa Hanska Luger for the graphic novel and art book SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide, and U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze for the collection Into the Hush.
The shortlist for the $10,000 PEN Open Book Award, given to “an exceptional book-length work of any literary genre by an author of color,” features two novels, Rickey Fayne’s The Devil Three Times and Justin Haynes’ Ibis; two poetry collections, Brandon Kilbourne’s Natural History and Samyak Shertok’s No Rhododendrons; and a nonfiction book, Mary Annette Pember’s Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools.
Shortlisted for the $10,000 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction are Peter Beinart for Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning; Jeanne Carstensen for A Greek Tragedy: One Day, a Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis; Siddharth Kara for The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery; Joseph Lee for Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity; and Julian Brave NoiseCat for We Survived the Night.
PEN America also announced the winners of two special prizes: Essayist and fiction writer Edwidge Danticat will receive the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, while playwright and screenwriter Julia Cho will be honored with the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award.
The PEN America Literary Awards were established in 1963, and currently include 10 categories. The winners of this year’s prizes will be announced at a ceremony in New York on March 31. The full lists of this year’s finalists are available here.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
