PEN America Literary Award Winners Honored

Ross Gay's Be Holding: A Poem (University of Pittsburgh Press) was honored with the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award at last night's virtual PEN America Literary Awards ceremony. Accepting the prize, Gay spoke of his desire to put into practice the "understanding that we are made of each other. I mean, the trees. And I mean the microbes. And I mean the breeze. And I mean the light that will go across the wall. I mean that we are made of each other."

Asako Serizawa, winner of the $10,000 PEN/Open Book Award for Inheritors (Doubleday), commented: "This is really an honor especially given what's been happening in New York and Atlanta and Minneapolis and really everywhere. What's been helpful to me is the coalition of voices that are resisting easy answers and positions, and PEN America has advocated for so many writers I admire who do this work towards coexistence."

In remarks memorializing literary giants lost this past year, PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said: "Another lesson of this year of tumult and torment lies in the power of those taken away from us to evoke, mobilize, and motivate. We have learned how saying their names can convert their will to live into a fire that burns inside each of us."

Other award winners named at the event included:

PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection ($25,000): Further News of Defeat by Michael X. Wang (Autumn House Press)
PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction ($10,000): Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn (MCD)
Pen/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection ($5,000): Obit by Victoria Chang (Copper Canyon Press)
PEN Translation Prize ($3,000): A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa (Seven Stories Press), translated from the French by Emma Ramadan
PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000): Raised by Wolves: Poems and Conversations by Amang (Phoneme Media), translated from the Chinese by Steve Bradbury
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($15,000): Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich (Twelve)
PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Prize for Biography ($5,000): Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by Amy Stanley (Scribner)
PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing ($10,000): Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl by Jonathan C. Slaght (FSG)
PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction ($10,000): Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman (Norton)
PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature ($50,000): Anne Carson
PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award ($10,000): Daniel Alexander Jones
PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award ($25,000): George C. Wolfe
PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing ($2,500): Kwame Dawes, Prairie Schooner
PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for Translation ($1,000): Pierre Joris

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