Weike Wang won the 2018 PEN/Hemingway Award, honoring a distinguished first book of fiction, for her novel, Chemistry (Knopf). The judges praised the book, a first-person narrative of a graduate chemist's personal and professional indecision, as a "brilliant book" written in "elliptical prose, spare and clean as bone."
Wang will receive $25,000 underwritten by the Hemingway Family Prize and the Hemingway Foundation; a month-long residency fellowship at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, a retreat for artists and writers; and a residency from the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series at the University of Idaho's MFA Creative Writing Program, and a $5,000 stipend.
The two PEN/Hemingway runners-up are Lisa Ko for The Leavers (Algonquin) and Adelia Saunders for Indelible (Bloomsbury). Two writers receive honorable mentions: Curtis Dawkins for The Graybar Hotel (Scribner) and Ian Bassingthwaighte for Live from Cairo (Scribner).
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The finalists for the 1943 Retrospective Hugo Awards have been chosen in nine categories and can be seen here. Winners will be announced on August 16 during Worldcon 76 in San Jose, Calif.