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| Percival Everett at the PEN America Literary Awards ceremony. | |
Percival Everett's Dr. No (Graywolf Press) was honored with the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award at the PEN America Literary Awards ceremony, held Thursday in New York City. Accepting the prize, Everett said: "I don't go out much, and for an old horseman this is kind of tough. I'd like to thank PEN for all they do--it's an amazing organization. For the last 30 years I've had one agent [who] told me when we first started working together, 'You're never going to make me any money, so just write what you want to write.' It was perhaps not well-advised, but I did."
PEN America president Ayad Akhtar praised this year's "moving and groundbreaking works," but also discussed what is at stake for the written word: "For the past 100 years, we've worked to defend the rights of writers to imagine, and speak, to create freely. As we look ahead to the next hundred years, our mission is fueled by new urgency. Alarming attempts to use the power of the state to ban ideas, and the books that contain them, have proliferated in this country, and we are also battling a dwindling space of civil exchange--and a growing belief on all sides of the political spectrum that the harms of speech hold an equal or even greater claim on us than the freedom to speak."
Other award winners named at the event included:
PEN Open Book Award ($10,000): The Black Period by Hafizah Augustus Geter (Random House)
PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection ($25,000): Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty (Tin House Books)
PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel ($10,000): Calling for a Blanket Dance by Oscar Hokeah (Algonquin Books)
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($15,000): A Left-Handed Woman by Judith Thurman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection ($5,000): To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness by Robin Coste Lewis (Knopf)
PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000): The Loose Pearl by Paula Ilabaca Nuñez, translated from Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky (co-im-press)
PEN Translation Prize ($3,000): People from Bloomington by Budi Darma, translated from Indonesian by Tiffany Tsao (Penguin Classics)
Honored with career achievement awards were comedy legend Tina Fey (PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award); titan of Hindi literature Vinod Kumar Shukla (PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature); and playwright Erika Dickerson-Despenza (PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award).