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| Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah accepting the PEN/Jean Stein Award. | |
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's Friday Black (Mariner Books) was honored with the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award at Tuesday night's PEN America Literary Awards ceremony in New York City. The judges called Friday Black a "brilliant debut collection of short stories" that "brings a new voice to old, vexing issues that continue to haunt American life: violence, racism, consumer lust, and more.... At turns horrifying and funny, tender and savage, these stories stick with you, probing the American psyche and persistently asking more of us."
Honorees for lifetime achievement were announced earlier this month. Other award winners named at the event included:
PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection ($25,000): Bring Out the Dog by Will Mackin (Random House)
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($10,000): Against Memoir by Michelle Tea (Feminist Press)
PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction ($10,000): In a Day's Work by Bernice Yeung (The New Press)
PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing ($10,000): Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter by Ben Goldfarb (Chelsea Green)
PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award ($25,000): Kenneth Lonergan
PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000): The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey by Rowan Ricardo Phillips (FSG)
PEN/Bograd Weld Prize for Biography ($5,000): Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry by Imani Perry (Beacon Press)
PEN/Open Book Award ($5,000): Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (Atria)
PEN Translation Prize ($3,000): Love by Hanne Ørstavik, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken (Archipelago Books)
PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000): A Certain Plume by Henri Michaux, translated from the French by Richard Sieburth (NYRB)