PEN Literary Awards 2022

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110 books

Since 1963, the PEN America Literary Awards have honored many of the most outstanding voices in literature across diverse genres, including fiction, poetry, science writing, essays, sports writing, biography, children’s literature, and drama. With the help of our partners, PEN America confers over 20 distinct awards, fellowships, grants and prizes each year, awarding nearly $350,000 to writers and translators.

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See the source list and commentary at pen.org

PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

Winner

The Kissing Bug

A True Story of a Parasite and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease

DIASY. HERNANDEZ, 2021

Finalists

The President and the Frog

Carolina De Robertis, 2021

The Trees

Percival Everett, 2021

Milk Blood Heat

Dantiel W. Moniz, 2021

Harrow

Joy Williams, 2021

Longlists

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

Rivka Galchen, 2021

Palmares

Gayl Jones, 2021

Seek You

A Journey Through American Loneliness

Kristen Radtke, 2021

White Magic

Elissa Washuta, 2021

Mutiny

Phillip B. Williams, 2021

PEN Open Book Award

Winner

Curb

Divya Victor, 2021

Finalists

Wake

The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts

Rebecca Hall, 2021

Antiman

A Hybrid Memoir

Rajiv Mohabir, 2022

Names for Light

A Family History

Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, 2021

White Magic

Elissa Washuta, 2021

Longlists

Libertie

Kaitlyn Greenidge, 2022

The Kissing Bug

A True Story of a Parasite and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease

DIASY. HERNANDEZ, 2021

Transversal

Urayoán Noel, 2021

Made in China

A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America's Cheap Goods

Amelia Pang, 2022

No Gods, No Monsters

Cadwell Turnbull, 2021

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

Winner

Skinship

Yoon Choi, 2021

Finalists

Eat the Mouth That Feeds You

Carribean Fragoza, 2021

Milk Blood Heat

Dantiel W. Moniz, 2021

Objects of Desire

Clare Sestanovich, 2021

Give My Love to the Savages

Chris Stuck, 2021

Longlists

Site Fidelity: Stories

Claire Boyles, 2021

Love Like That

Emma Duffy-Comparone, 2021

What Isn't Remembered

Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, 2021

Mad Prairie

Stories and a Novella

Kate McIntyre, 2021

The Rock Eaters

Brenda Peynado, 2021

PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel

Winner

Detransition, Baby

Torrey Peters, 2021

Finalists

Burnt Sugar

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020

Avni Doshi, 2020

Dear Miss Metropolitan

Carolyn Ferrell, 2021

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

An Oprah's Book Club Novel

Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, 2021

The Five Wounds

Kirstin Valdez Quade, 2021

Longlists

Swimming Back to Trout River

Linda Rui Feng, 2021

The Recent East

Thomas Grattan, 2021

Future Feeling

Joss Lake, 2021

Bed Stuy

Jerry McGill, 2021

Nightbitch

Rachel Yoder, 2021

PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Winner

Graceland, At Last

Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South

Margaret Renkl, 2021

Finalists

A Little Devil in America

Notes in Praise of Black Performance

Hanif Abdurraqib, 2021

Homo Irrealis

André Aciman, 2021

Black Paper

Writing in a Dark Time

Teju Cole, 2021

These Precious Days

Ann Patchett, 2021

Longlists

Cranial Fracking

Ian Frazier, 2021

Endings & Beginnings

DeWitt Henry, 2021

Nine Nasty Words

English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever

John McWhorter, 2021

Languages of Truth

Essays 2003-2020

Salman Rushdie, 2021

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

George Saunders, 2022

PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection

Winner

frank: sonnets

Diane Seuss, 2021

Finalists

Yellow Rain

Mai Der Vang, 2021

Sho

Douglas Kearney, 2021

Heard-Hoard

Atsuro Riley, 2021

Mutiny

Phillip B. Williams, 2021

Longlists

Pilgrim Bell

Kaveh Akbar, 2021

The Wild Fox of Yemen

Threa Almontaser, 2021

Reparations Now!

Ashley M. Jones, 2021

Cutlish

Rajiv Mohabir, 2021

How to Not Be Afraid of Everything

Jane Wong, 2021

PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

Winner

Everything I Don't Know

Jerzy Ficowski, 2021

Finalists

Exhausted on the Cross

Najwan Darwish, 2021

I Name Him Me

Selected Poems of Ma Yan

Outgoing Vessel

Ursula Andkjær Olsen, 2021

Ova Completa

Susana Thenon, 2020

Longlists

Edinburgh Notebook

Valerie Mejer Caso, 2021

Words As Grain

New and Selected Poems

The Voices

And Other Poems

Rainer Maria Rilke, 2021

Catcalling

Damascus, Atlantis

Marie Silkeberg, 2021

PEN Translation Prize

Winner

Migratory Birds

Mariana Oliver, 2021

Finalists

FEM

Magda Carneci, 2021

New Year

The Last One

Fatima Daas, 2021

Kaya Days

Carl de Souza, 2021

Longlists

The Divorce

Cesar Aira, 2021

The Touch System

Alejandra Costamagna, 2021

I'm in Seattle, Where Are You?

Mortada Gzar, 2021

Lean Your Loneliness Slowly Against Mine

Klara Hveberg, 2021

Faraway

Lo Yi-Chin, 2021

PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

Winner

Fox and I

An Uncommon Friendship

Catherine Raven, 2022

Finalists

The Memory Thief

The Secrets Behind How We Remember—A Medical Mystery

Lauren Aguirre, 2021

The Disordered Cosmos

A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, 2021

Believers

Making a Life at the End of the World

Lisa Wells, 2021

Life's Edge

The Search for What It Means to Be Alive

Carl Zimmer, 2022

Longlists

This Is the Voice

John Colapinto, 2021

Holding Back the River

The Struggle Against Nature on America's Waterways

Tyler J. Kelley, 2021

Extraterrestrial

The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

Second Nature

Scenes from a World Remade

Nathaniel Rich, 2021

Count Down

How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race

Shanna H. Swan, Stacey Colino, 2021

PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

Winner

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days

The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler

Rebecca Donner, 2021

Finalists

The Invention of Miracles

Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness

Katie Booth, 2022

Albert and the Whale

Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World

Philip Hoare, 2021

The Gambler Wife

A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

Andrew D. Kaufman, 2021

Orwell's Roses

Rebecca Solnit, 2021

Longlists

Facing the Mountain

A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II

Daniel James Brown, 2021

King of the Blues

The Rise and Reign of B. B. King

Daniel de Vise, 2021

Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Fiona Sampson, 2021

Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight

Julia Sweig, 2021

The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock: An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense

Edward White, 2021

PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction

Winner

All That She Carried

The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

Tiya Miles, 2022

Finalists

Invisible Child

Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City

Andrea Elliott, 2021

Halfway Home

Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

Reuben Jonathan Miller, 2021

Let the Record Show

A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993

Sarah Schulman, 2021

How the Word Is Passed

A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

Clint Smith, 2021

Longlists

Pure America

Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia

Elizabeth Catte, 2022

Children Under Fire

An American Crisis

John Woodrow Cox, 2021

The Ravine

A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed

Wendy Lower, 2021

Made in China

A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America's Cheap Goods

Amelia Pang, 2022

Empire of Pain

The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

Patrick Radden Keefe, 2021