From these finalists for the PEN America Literary Awards, winners will be announced on April 8 and receive a total of more than US$380,000.
Dining tents in New York City’s Bryant Park, February 4. Image – iStockphoto: Massimo Giachetti
From 1,850 Submissions, 55 Finalists
A total of 55 titles in 11 categories have been named today (February 10) as finalists in the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards. They now are in contention for an aggregate purse of more than US$380,000. PEN America, of course, is the US affiliate chapter of PEN International.
An important and notably serious program among world publishing’s myriad awards programs each year, this series is also at times confusing because its sponsor-named categories vary widely in their nature and prize money. Some awards are funded for biennial presentation, rather than yearly.
This morning,
PEN America released the 2021 Literary Awards Finalists. More than forty-five imprints and presses are featured on the list, with half of the titles coming from university and indie presses. Twenty books are from writers making their literary debuts, and half the titles among the open-genre awards are poetry collections. Chosen by a cohort of judges representing a wide range of disciplines, backgrounds, identities, and aesthetic lineages, these fifty-five Finalist books represent a humbling selection of the year’s finest examples of literary excellence.
The stories on the Finalists lists are about parents, grandparents, and grandchildren, about siblings and their rivalries. These writers share the lives of people who are nonbinary and people who are transgender; people of all ages with changing bodies; immigrants and citizens and people seeking refuge; a basketball legend; a young woman who plucks factory chickens smooth; a tugboat driver; and Phillis Wheatley, Ame
The Best Translated Books You Missed in 2020
As we approach the end of 2020, we’ve been speaking with translators, critics, publishers, writers, and booksellers about outstanding books in translation that readers might have missed this year. Read on for recommendations from Daniel Hahn, Maya Jaggi, Meng Jin, Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, Boyd Tonkin, and more.
Ulysses and
Mrs. Dalloway, this book, first published in Hindi in 1963, traces the experiences of a flaneur wandering through a city over the course of a single day, recording his experiences, memories, reflections, and emotional reactions to the world around him. The setting is the city of Jalandhar in 1930, an era of rapid change as India launched forward, fusing elements of its long, rich past with modern ideas and cultural elements to form a new, hybrid culture, amplified in all of its complexity by the country s dazzlingly complex multiethnic and multilingual nature.