February 10, 2021, 11:43am
Today, PEN America announced the finalists for its 2021 Literary Awards, which recognizes and honors “dynamic, imaginative, and thought-provoking” books published in the last year. Previous winners include Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Imani Perry, and Yiyun Li.
The 55 finalists were selected across 11 categories—PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, Open Book Award, Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, Debut Novel, Poetry Collection, Poetry in Translation, Translation, Essay, Science Writing, Biography, and Nonfiction—by a panel of esteemed writers, editors, translators, and critics, who collectively read over 1,850 books for this Award’s cycle.
The winner in each category will be announced live at a virtual ceremony on April 8, 2021. A hearty congrats to all!
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Finalists for the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards
PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD
Anthony Cody, Borderland Apocrypha
Akwaeke Emezi, The Death of Vivek Oji
Ross Gay, Be Holding: A Poem
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, The Freezer Door
Kawai Strong Washburn, Sharks in the Time of Saviors
PEN OPEN BOOK AWARD
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, A Treatise on Stars
Hafizah Geter, Un-American
S*an D. Henry-Smith, Wild Peach
Asako Serizawa, Inheritors
Souvankham Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife: Stories
PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE FOR DEBUT SHORT STORY COLLECTION
Dima Alzayat, Alligator & Other Stories
Miriam Cohen, Adults and Other Children
Mary South, You Will Never Be Forgotten
Shruti Swamy, A House Is a Body
Michael X. Wang, Further News of Defeat
PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD FOR DEBUT NOVEL
Maisy Card, These Ghosts Are Family
Raven Leilani, Luster
Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain
Kawai Strong Washburn, Sharks in the Time of Saviors
C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills Is Gold
PEN/VOELCKER AWARD FOR POETRY COLLECTION
Rae Armantrout, Conjure
Victoria Chang, Obit
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Age of Phillis
John Murillo, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry
Gerald Stern, Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000–2018
PEN AWARD FOR POETRY IN TRANSLATION
Garous Abdolmalekian, Lean Against This Late Hour
Translated from the Persian by Ahmad Nadalizadeh and Idra Novey
Amang, Raised by Wolves: Poems and Conversations
Translated from the Chinese by Steve Bradbury
Helena Boberg, Sense Violence
Translated from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson
Lucía Estrada, Katabasis
Translated from the Spanish by Olivia Lott
Serhiy Zhadan, A New Orthography
Translated from the Ukrainian by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin
PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE
Kaouther Adimi, Our Riches
Translated from the French by Chris Andrews
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, That Hair: A Novel
Translated from the Portuguese by Eric M. B. Becker
Juan Cárdenas, Ornamental
Translated from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis
Jessica Schiefauer, Girls Lost
Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel
Abdellah Taïa, A Country for Dying
Translated from the French by Emma Ramadan
PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY
Barbara Ehrenreich, Had I Known: Collected Essays
Vivian Gornick, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader
Robert Michael Pyle, Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays
Natasha Sajé, Terroir: Love, Out of Place
Luc Sante, Maybe the People Would Be the Times
PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD
Jennifer Ackerman, The Bird Way
Rebecca Giggs, Fathoms: The World in the Whale
Emily Levesque, The Last Stargazers
Sonia Shah, The Next Great Migration
Jonathan C. Slaght, Owls of the Eastern Ice
PEN/JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY
Sudhir Hazareesingh, Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture
Ben Hubbard, MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman
Peniel E. Joseph, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
Heather Dune Macadam, 999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz
Amy Stanley, Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World
PEN/JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH AWARD FOR NONFICTION
Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House
Beth C. Caldwell, Deported Americans: Life after Deportation to Mexico
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
[h/t PEN]