PEN Literary Awards 2021

11 books

PEN America Literary Awards have honored outstanding voices in translation, fiction, poetry, science writing, essay, sports writing, biography, children’s literature, and drama.

Be Holding

A Poem

Ross Gay, 2020

PEN Open Book Award

Inheritors

Asako Serizawa, 2020

PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize For Debut Short Story Collection

Further News of Defeat: Stories

Michael X. Wang, 2020

PEN/Hemingway Award For Debut Novel

Sharks in the Time of Saviors

A Novel

Kawai Strong Washburn, 2020

PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award For The Art Of The Essay

Had I Known

Collected Essays

Barbara Ehrenreich, 2020

PEN/Voelcker Award For Poetry Collection

Obit

Victoria Chang, 2020

PEN Award For Poetry In Translation

Raised by Wolves

Amang, 2020

PEN Translation Prize

A Country for Dying

Abdellah Taïa, 2020

PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

Owls of the Eastern Ice

A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl

Jonathan C. Slaght, 2020

PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award For Nonfiction

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

Saidiya Hartman, 2019

PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award For Biography

Stranger in the Shogun's City

A Japanese Woman and Her World

Amy Stanley, 2020