PEN announced the 2016 Literary Awards shortlist today after judges narrowed down each of the eight categories to five books. More than $200,000 will be received by writers and translators of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, biography and essays.
Winners of all the 2016 awards will be announced on March 1, excluding those for Debut Fiction, Art of the Essay, and Literary Science Writing awards, as well as the PEN Open Book and the PEN/Fusion Prize, which will be named live at the 2016 PEN Literary Awards Ceremony on April 11 at The New School in NYC.
The shortlist in its entirety can be viewed below:
PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction ($25,000)
In the Country: Stories by Mia Alvar
The Turner House by Angela Flournoy
Mr. and Mrs. Doctor by Julie Iromuanya
The Sympathizer: A Novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness by Jennifer Tseng
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($10,000)
After the Tall Timber: Collected Non-Fiction by Renata Adler
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehesi Coates
The Quarry by Susan Howe
The Givenness of Things: Essays by Marilynne Robinson
Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles by David L. Ulin
PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award ($10,000)
Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett
The End of Plenty: The Race to Feed a Crowded World by Joel K. Bourne Jr.
The Boy Who Played with Fusion: Extreme Science, Extreme Parenting, and How to Make a Star by Tom Clynes
Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future by Lauren Redniss
Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World by Alexandra Witze & Jeff Kanipe
PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000)
Not a Game: The Incredible Rise and Unthinkable Fall of Allen Iverson by Kent Babb
The Domino Diaries: My Decade Boxing with Olympic Champions and Chasing Hemingway’s Ghost in the Last Days of Castro’s Cuba by Brin-Jonathan Butler
The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball’s Lost Triumph by Scott Ellsworth
Molina: The Story of the Father Who Raised an Unlikely Baseball Dynasty by Bengie Molina with Joan Ryan
The Grind: Inside Baseball’s Endless Season by Barry Svrluga
PEN Open Book Award ($5,000)
(For an exceptional book-length work of literature by an author of color.)
Chord by Rick Barot
Bastards of the Reagan Era by Reginald Dwayne Betts
Forest Primeval: Poems by Vievee Francis
Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey by Marie Mutsuki Mockett
Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy
PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography ($5,000)
The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects by Deborah Lutz
Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art by Nancy Princenthal
John le Carré: The Biography by Adam Sisman
Michelle Obama: A Life by Peter Slevin
Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
PEN Translation Prize ($3,000)
The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector (trans. from Portuguese by Katrina Dodson)
The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin (trans. from Russian by Jamey Gambrell)
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (trans. from Russian by Oliver Ready)
The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov (trans. from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel)
Hollow Heart by Viola Di Grado (trans. from Italian by Antony Shugaar)
PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000)
The School of Solitude: Collected Poems by Luis Hernández (trans. from Spanish by Anthony Geist)
The Late Poems of Wang An-Shih (trans. from Chinese by David Hinton)
Rilke Shake by Angélica Freitas (trans. from Portuguese by Hilary Kaplan)
I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems by Arseny Tarkovsky (trans. from Russian by Philip Metres & Dimitri Psurtsev)