PEN America Announces Shortlist for 2016 Literary Awards

PEN America revealed the shortlists for the 2016 PEN Literary Awards, including finalists for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Finalists including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Mia Alvar, Angela Flournoy, Marilynne Robinson, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Jennifer Tseng will compete for the $25,000 prize. The winner will be announced live on April 11 during a ceremony at the New School Auditorium in New York.

The complete 2016 PEN Literary Awards shortlists are as follows:

PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction ($25,000)

In the Country: Stories (Alfred A. Knopf), Mia Alvar

The Turner House (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Angela Flournoy

Mr. and Mrs. Doctor (Coffee House Press), Julie Iromuanya

The Sympathizer: A Novel (Grove Press), Viet Thanh Nguyen

Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (Europa Editions), Jennifer Tseng


PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($10,000)

After the Tall Timber: Collected Non-Fiction (New York Review Books), Renata Adler

Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau/Random House), Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Quarry (New Directions), Susan Howe

The Givenness of Things: Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Marilynne Robinson

Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles (University of California Press), David L. Ulin

PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award ($10,000)

Rain: A Natural and Cultural History (Crown), Cynthia Barnett

The End of Plenty: The Race to Feed a Crowded World (W. W. Norton & Company), Joel K. Bourne Jr.

The Boy Who Played with Fusion: Extreme Science, Extreme Parenting, and How to Make a Star (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Tom Clynes

Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future (Random House), Lauren Redniss

Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World (Pegasus Books), Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe

PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000)

Not a Game: The Incredible Rise and Unthinkable Fall of Allen Iverson (Atria Books/Simon & Schuster), Kent Babb

The Domino Diaries: My Decade Boxing with Olympic Champions and Chasing Hemingway's Ghost in the Last Days of Castro's Cuba (Picador), Brin-Jonathan Butler

The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball's Lost Triumph (Little Brown and Company), Scott Ellsworth

Molina: The Story of the Father Who Raised an Unlikely Baseball Dynasty (Simon & Schuster), Bengie Molina with Joan Ryan

The Grind: Inside Baseball's Endless Season (Blue Rider Press), Barry Svrluga

PEN Open Book Award ($5,000)

Chord (Sarabande Books), Rick Barot

Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books), Reginald Dwayne Betts

Forest Primeval: Poems (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern), Vievee Francis

Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (W. W. Norton & Company), Marie Mutsuki Mockett

Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape (Counterpoint), Lauret Savoy

PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography ($5,000)

The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (W. W. Norton & Company), Deborah Lutz

Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames & Hudson), Nancy Princenthal

John le Carré: The Biography (Harper Books), Adam Sisman

Michelle Obama: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf), Peter Slevin

Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (Harper Books), Rosemary Sullivan

PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000)

The School of Solitude: Collected Poems by Luis Hernández (Swan Isle Press), translated from the Spanish by Anthony Geist

The Late Poems of Wang An-shih (New Directions), translated from the Chinese by David Hinton

Rilke Shake by Angélica Freitas (Phoneme Media) translated from the Portuguese by Hilary Kaplan

I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), translated from the Russian by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev

The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books), translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu

PEN Translation Prize ($3,000)

The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector (New Directions), translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson

The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Penguin Classic), translated from the Russian by Oliver Ready

The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov (Open Letter Books), translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

Hollow Heart by Viola Di Grado (Europa Editions), translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar

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