Yiyun Li's Where Reasons End (Random House) was honored with the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award at Monday night's PEN America Literary Awards ceremony in New York City. The judges called Where Reasons End a "spare, haunting, deeply humane novel.... Li has written a novel unlike anything we have read before, a book that is beautiful and wise, and almost unbearably moving in its portrait of a woman turning to literature as to a last resort, and finding that it might--barely, savingly--suffice." Other award winners named at the event included:
PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection ($25,000): Last of Her Name by Mimi Lok (Kaya Press)
PEN/Open Book Award ($5,000): The Grave on the Wall by Brandon Shimoda (City Lights Books)
PEN Translation Prize ($3,000): The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell (Europa Editions)
PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000): The Winter Garden Photograph by Reina María Rodríguez, translated from the Spanish by Kristin Dykstra & Nancy Gates Madsen (Ugly Duckling Presse)
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($10,000): Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio’s Natural Landscape by Deborah Fleming (Kent State University Press)
PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Prize for Biography ($5,000): Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (Norton)
PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing ($10,000): Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves by Frans de Waal (Norton)
PEN/Edward & Lily Tuck Award for Paraguayan Literature ($3,000): Liz Haedo for Pieles de Papel
PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature ($50,000): M. NourbeSe Philip
PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award: Tanya Barfield
PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry ($5,000): Rigoberto González
PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award ($25,000): Tom Stoppard