Announcing the PEN Longlists, Pt. 1

All this week, we’ll be helping the PEN American Center announce the longlists for their 2016 PEN Literary Awards. First up: the PEN/Robert W. Bingham and PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Awards.

PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction ($25,000):

To an author whose debut work—a first novel or collection of short stories published in 2015—represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise of a second work of literary fiction.

JUDGES: Helon Habila, Elizabeth McCracken, Edie Meidav, and Jess Row

LONGLIST:
In the Country: Stories (Alfred A. Knopf), Mia Alvar
The Boatmaker (Tin House Books), John Benditt
Did You Ever Have A Family (Gallery/Scout Press/Simon & Schuster), Bill Clegg
Hausfrau: A Novel (Random House), Jill Alexander Essbaum
The Turner House (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Angela Flournoy
Mr. and Mrs. Doctor (Coffee House Press), Julie Iromuanya
The Sympathizer: A Novel (Grove Press), Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Given World: A Novel (Simon & Schuster), Marian Palaia
It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides (Fiction Collective Two/University of Alabama Press), Jessica Lee Richardson
Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (Europa Editions), Jennifer Tseng

PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($10,000):

For a book of essays published in 2015 that exemplifies the dignity and esteem that the essay form imparts to literature.

JUDGES: Verlyn Klinkenborg, Meghan O’Rourke, and Luc Sante

LONGLIST:
After the Tall Timber: Collected Non-Fiction (New York Review Books), Renata Adler
This Old Man: All in Pieces (Doubleday), Roger Angell
Our Only World: Ten Essays (Counterpoint), Wendell Berry
Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau/Random House), Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Quarry (New Directions), Susan Howe
Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader (Thames & Hudson), Linda Nochlin
The Givenness of Things: Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Marilynne Robinson
Reporting Always: Writings from The New Yorker (Scribner/Simon & Schuster), Lillian Ross
The Life of Images: Selected Prose (Ecco/HarperCollins), Charles Simic
Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles (University of California Press), David L. Ulin