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
That gay men who lived through the crisis years of the AIDS epidemic feel triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic now upon us is hardly surprising. I m triggered. Reading
All the Young Men (Grove Press), Ruth Coker Burks big-hearted memoir of working in support of gay men with HIV in the period not just before the advent of the protease inhibitors but before there was even a name for the virus, let alone clarity about how it was transmitted brings that singular kind of consolation, and even joy, that comes with the finding of meaning in tragedy.
Burks co-author, Kevin Carr O Leary, surely merits some of the credit for the book s sure-footedness, but the story retains a strong personal voice. A 26-year-old divorced single mother Southern bottle-blonde, Burks literally stepped into AIDS service work unintentionally, on a trip to visit her friend Bonnie in a Little Rock, Arkansas hospital in 1986.
Wake up to the sound of an alarm clock you didn’t really need to set. Remember the day that lies ahead of you, and drift off again for a few minutes. Repeat. Slide your feet into a pair of slippers, or don’t, and shuffle to the kitchen to make coffee. Still in your pajamas, drink this coffee at your desk while looking over your work from the day before. Remove a comma from the last sentence you translated before going to bed. Put it back. Remember that you haven’t brushed your teeth yet. Read the next paragraph in the book you’re translating, twice. Just as the right phrase begins to take shape in your mind, go brush your teeth. Forget the phrase you’d come up with and abandon hope of recovering it. Let the caffeine kick in. Ride this momentum until you reach a difficult sentence, then rise mindlessly in search of a snack. Google the etymology of “secretion” and observe a shift in your targeted ads. Remove a comma from the first sentence you translated after lunch. Put
Tyll, Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin (Quercus)
The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf)
Inland, Téa Obreht (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
We Cast a Shadow, Maurice Carlos Ruffin (One World)
The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
The Bird King, G. Willow Wilson (Grove Press)
A total of 49 titles were nominated by libraries from 30 countries. The shortlist will be announced March 25, 2021, and the winner May 20. The shortlist and winner are chosen by the judging panel, consisting of Jan Carson, David James Karashima, Rita Sakr, Martín Veiga, and Enda Wyley, with Chris Morash acting as non-voting chairperson.
For more information, including the complete longlist, see the award website.