The annual presentation of PEN America’s literary awards and career achievement honors was produced digitally for a second year.
A collage of some 55 finalists in the PEN America 2021 Literary Awards program. Image: PEN America
Nossel: ‘This Year of Tumult and Torment’
In our previews of the PEN America Literary Award finalists and the program’s Career Achievement Prize recipients,
Publishing Perspectives readers looked at one of the more complex annual presentations of a broad range of disparate awards.
Funded by many generous donors and presented on varying schedules, the program carries a combined value of more than US$380,000 in prize money and these awards carry the luster of PEN’s humanitarian stance when conferred on an author’s work.
V.V. Ganeshananthan: You say at the top of your
Vogue essay [about Kamala Harris], that our institution and communities have to “do more to heed the perspectives of Black people and people of color in their midst.” I think that’s always been true just in terms of morality and social justice. But leaders like Kamala Harris and Stacey Abrams are now real power brokers in the Democratic Party, and voters of color were crucial to Biden’s primary and his victory in the election. And so Democrats really can’t win elections without those voting blocs. So what should Joe Biden and Kamala Harris be doing in practical terms to heed the perspectives of Black people and people of color?
Natasha Gilmore, Idlewild Books and Open Borders Books, NYC
: This book contains two novellas and some short stories set around Colombia (and occasionally Miami). The narration is often low-affect, sharply cynical, and wryly observed. There’s a cutting honesty in the voice throughout the book that feels totally absent from so much literature now. It reminded me of the feeling of encountering something truly when I was a teenager. But then there’s just the crushing reality of coming into sexuality as a teen, colorism and racism in Colombia, the restlessness wrought by capitalism and the desire to flee yourself and the accidents of your birth that ultimately coalesce into something so universally resonant, that will make any reader feel seen and connected. Truly an author worthy of attention.
Portland finds place on PEN America awards longlists; ‘Sharks in the Time of Saviors’ dominates
Updated Dec 22, 2020;
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PEN America on Tuesday announced the “longlists” for its 2021 awards, making a debut novel with a Portland connection an oddsmakers’ favorite to take home a prize.
Kawai Strong Washburn’s “Sharks in the Time of Saviors” made the list in three categories, the first time that’s ever happened. The novel, a mystical family epic that partly takes place in the Rose City, is in the running for the Jean Stein Book Award, the Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the PEN Open Book Award.
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Whatever Twitter, Spotify and YouTube can do, Barack Obama can do too. As the big tech platforms release their most popular lists for 2020, so too has the former US president, who took to social media to share his favourite songs, TV shows, books and movies of the year.
Obama, who also got to celebrate his former vice president Joe Biden winning the 2020 US election, shared his big and small screen highlights of 2020, as well as the books he’s read and the music he’s been listening to, showing off his diverse tastes. Here s a look at all of his top picks for the year: