Here are the winners of the 2022 PEN America Literary Awards.
The winners of the 2022 PEN America Literary Awards were presented last night at The Town Hall in New York City, in a ceremony hosted by Seth Meyers. Selected by jury, more than 40 writers and translators were recognized; as a group, they were awarded more than $350,000. You can watch the ceremony here.
Below are this year’s winners:
PEN/Jean Stein Book Award ($75,000)
Judges: Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Angie Cruz, Maurice Manning, Steph Opitz
Winner
The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease, Daisy Hernández (Tin House Books)
Finalists: The President and The Frog, Carolina De Robertis (Knopf)
The Trees: A Novel, Percival Everett (Graywolf Press)
Milk Blood Heat, Dantiel W. Moniz (Grove Press)
Harrow, Joy Williams (Knopf)
*
Pen Open Book Award ($10,000)
Judges: Jaquira Díaz, Rigoberto González, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Khadijah Queen
Winner
Curb, Divya Victor (Nightboat Books)
Finalists: Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, Rebecca Hall (Simon & Schuster)
Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir, Rajiv Mohabir (Restless Books)
Names for Light: A Family History, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint (Graywolf Press)
White Magic, Elissa Washuta (Tin House Books)
*
Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection ($25,000)
Judges: Ling Ma, Manuel Muñoz, Oscar Villalon
Winner
Skinship: Stories, Yoon Choi (Knopf)
Finalists: Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, Carribean Fragoza (City Lights Books)
Milk Blood Heat, Dantiel W. Moniz (Grove Press)
Objects of Desire: Stories, Clare Sestanovich (Knopf)
Give My Love to the Savages: Stories, Chris Stuck (Amistad Press)
*
Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel ($10,000)
Judges: Zeyn Joukhadar, Téa Obreht, Daniel Torday
Winner
Detransition, Baby: A Novel, Torrey Peters (MCD)
Finalists: Burnt Sugar, Avni Doshi (The Overlook Press)
Dear Miss Metropolitan: A Novel, Carolyn Ferrell (Henry Holt & Company)
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Novel, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Harper)
The Five Wounds: A Novel, Kirstin Valdez Quade (W.W. Norton & Company)
*
Pen/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for The Art of the Essay ($15,000)
Judges: Jason DeParle, Hua Hsu, Marilynne Robinson
Winner
Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South, Margaret Renkl (Milkweed Editions)
Finalists: A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)
Homo Irrealis: Essays, André Aciman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time, Teju Cole (University of Chicago Press)
These Precious Days: Essays, Ann Patchett (Harper)
*
Pen/Voelcker Award For Poetry Collection ($5,000)
Judges: Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Lia Purpura, Safiya Sinclair
Winner
frank: sonnets, Diane Seuss (Graywolf Press)
Finalists: Yellow Rain: Poems, Mai Der Vang (Graywolf Press),
Sho, Douglas Kearney (Wave Books)
Heard-Hoard, Atsuro Riley (University of Chicago Press)
frank: sonnets, Diane Seuss (Graywolf Press)
Mutiny, Phillip B. Williams (Penguin Books)
*
Pen Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000)
Judges: Caro Carter, Michael Favala Goldman, Parisa Saranj
Winner
Everything I Don’t Know, Jerzy Ficowski (World Poetry Books), translated from the Polish by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer
Finalists: Exhausted on the Cross, Najwan Darwish (New York Review Books), Translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid · I Name Him Me: Selected Poems of Ma Yan, Ma Yan (Ugly Duckling Presse), Translated from the Chinese by Stephen Nashef · Outgoing Vessel, Ursula Andkjær Olsen (Action Books), Translated from the Danish by Katrine Øgaard Jensen · Ova Completa, Susana Thénon (Ugly Duckling Presse), Translated from Spanish by Rebekah Smith
*
Pen Translation Prize ($3,000)
Judges: Almiro Andrade, Mayada Ibrahim, Barbara Ofosu-Somuah, Sharon E. Rhodes
Winner
Migratory Birds, Mariana Oliver (Transit Books), Translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches
Finalists: FEM, Magda Cârneci (Deep Vellum), Translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter
New Year, Juli Zeh (World Editions), Translated from the German by Alta L. Price
The Last One: A Novel, Fatima Daas (Other Press), Translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud
Kaya Days: A Novel, Carl de Souza (Two Line Press), Translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman
*
Pen/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award ($10,000)
Judges: Jonathan Safran Foer, Michele Harper, Lauren Redniss
Winner
Fox & I: Uncommon Friendship, Catherine Raven (Spiegel & Grau)
Finalists: The Memory Thief: And the Secrets Behind What We Remember — A Medical Mystery, Lauren Aguirre (Pegasus Books)
The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Bold Type Books)
Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World, Lisa Wells (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive, Carl Zimmer (Dutton Books)
*
Pen/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography ($5,000)
Judges: Luke Dittrich, Paul Golob, Imani Perry
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 (Little Brown and Company)
Finalists: The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness, Katie Booth (Simon & Schuster)
Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World, Phillip Hoare (Pegasus Books)
The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky, Andrew D. Kaufman (Riverhead Books)
Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit (Viking)
*
Pen/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction ($10,000)
Judges: Emma Copley Eisenberg, Dr. K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Chanel Miller, Dagmawi Woubshet
Winner
All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family’s Keepsake, Tiya Miles (Random House),Bookshop
Finalists: Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City, Andrea Elliott (Random House)
Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, Reuben Jonathan Miller (Little Brown and Company)
Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, Sarah Schulman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, Clint Smith (Little Brown and Company)
