The 62nd annual PEN America Literary Awards were held March 31 at the Town Hall in midtown Manhattan, awarding nearly $350,000 to writers, editors, and translators at a ceremony hosted by comedian, author, and actor Murray Hill.
In his opening remarks, Hill joked that the evening was akin to "the Grammys, but for tonight, Emma Straub is Beyoncé," before taking a more serious tack to decry governments' efforts "to squash diversity in our schools, our libraries, our businesses, and our halls of power."
The rest of the evening marked a return to form for the free speech organization's flagship literary prizes, which had been diminished in recent years by a boycott, led by Writers Against the War in Gaza, which was lifted on December 31, 2025. Due to numerous authors withdrawing their books from consideration, the ceremony and a number of awards were canceled in 2024. Last year, the ceremony returned but one of its top prizes, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, was not conferred due to author withdrawals.
While Gaza loomed less largely over this year’s ceremony, Peter Beinart, whose Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning (Knopf) received the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, began his acceptance speech by "acknowledg[ing] that there are many Palestinian writers in Gaza and beyond who have the talent to win awards like this but didn't have the opportunities that I've had." He continued, "I wrote my book because I believe there is another Judaism than the one being offered by the Israeli government and America's most powerful Jewish organizations."
Among the winners were Cannupa Hanska Luger, whose Surviva: A Future Ancestral Field Guide (Aora), won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, which stood as the evening’s largest monetary prize at $75,000. Jamaica Kincaid won the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974– (FSG), and Nicholas Boggs’s Baldwin: A Love Story (FSG) won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.
Other winners included Pria Anand, whose The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains (Washington Square) won the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award; Jared Lemus, whose Guatemalan Rhapsody (Ecco) won the $25,000 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection; Justin Haynes, whose debut Ibis (Overlook) won the PEN Open Book Award for authors of color; and Aracelis Girmay, whose Green Of All Heads (Boa) received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection.
In the evening’s two translation categories, Michael Martin Shea won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for his translation from Spanish of Theory of the Voice and Dream (World Poetry) by Liliana Ponce, and Minna Zallman Proctor won the PEN Translation Prize for her translation from Italian of The Leucothea Dialogues (Archipelago) by Cesare Pavese.
The ceremony also included the presentation of two career achievement awards. Marlon James presented Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat with the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, and playwright Julia Cho received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award.
The ceremony also marked the first under new PEN America co-CEOs Summer Lopez and Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, who were officially appointed in February after helming the organization on an interim basis since November 2024.
