The 61st annual PEN America Literary Awards were held May 8 at the Town Hall in midtown Manhattan, awarding nearly $350,000 in prizes to writers, editors, and translators at a ceremony hosted by broadcast journalist and television personality Tamron Hall. The event marked the return of one of the country’s largest literary awards programs following the cancelation of last year’s event and a number of awards, after a number of writers withdrew their books from consideration as part of a boycott over the organization's response to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

At the outset of the ceremony, Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, interim CEO of PEN America, took the stage to address the elephant in the room, if somewhat obliquely. “I want to acknowledge what happened last year,” she said. “It was a loss, a loss that we feel deeply.” She noted that the honorees and judges from last year’s prizes were currently in attendance: “Your work your voices and your presence here tonight in this gathering is essential, and we thank you.”

Rosaz Shariyf concluded her opening address by stressing PEN America’s commitment to writers. “We truly believe at PEN America that writers bring our mission to life,” she said. “Writing is our resistance writing is our refuge and it is also our joy. We are committed to being a place where every voice matters and where stories have the freedom to take flight.”

While the evening was largely business as usual, there was one notable exception: For a second year in a row, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award was not conferred. The three finalists for the prize were Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn (MCD), With My Back to the World: Poems by Victoria Chang (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and On Freedom by Timothy Snyder (Crown). Five finalists were originally chosen for the prize and two withdrew, including the finalist chosen as the winner. Previously, Kaveh Akbar and Brandon Shimoda had withdrawn from the longlist for the prize.

Rosaz Shariyf told the audience on behalf of Katrina and Wendy vanden Heuvel, the daughters of award namesake Jean Stein, that the two finalists had withdrawn over "their objection to PEN America's response to the genocide in Palestine."

“While we are disappointed that circumstances would lead once again to the award not going to a writer, especially in a time when federal arts funding is getting slashed, we respect the right of protest in all of its nonviolent forms, including this one," Rosaz Shariyf read in the vanden Heuvels' statement. "Our mother, a passionate supporter of Palestinian rights as well as a publisher of Palestinian writers and artists, would have respected this decision too.”

The $75,000 purse, the statement concluded, would be divided and donated to two nonprofits: the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, which provides “humanitarian aid for children living among devastation and displacement,” and Palestine Legal, “a legal aid organization dedicated to protecting the civil and constitutional rights of people in the U.S. who speak out for Palestinian freedom.”

While the 2025 awards didn’t see the mass author withdrawals that led to the cancelation of last year's ceremony, PEN America confirmed to PW that that seven of 55 finalists across 11 award categories withdrew this year. Among the other prizes affected by withdrawals, including from longlists, were the PEN Open Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the PEN Translation Prize, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award.

Among the winners announced that evening were Amy Stuber, whose Sad Grownups (Stillhouse Press) received the $25,000 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Story Collection, and Dagoberto Gilb, whose A Passing West: Essays from the Borderlands (University of New Mexico Press) won the $15,000 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

Stuber was the only award recipient to acknowledge the situation at PEN over the past year, which resulted in the departure of its former CEO, Suzanne Nossel, last October. “Thanks to PEN for doing work this year around Palestine,” she said. “I just want to say, stop the genocide and free Palestine.”

Other winners include Kali Nicole Gross, whoseVengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women’s Fury in Lawless Times (Seal Press) won the Open Book Award for authors of color; Michael Deagler, whose Early Sobrieties (Astra House) won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel; Ana Raquel Minia, whose In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States (Viking) won the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction; and Jason Roberts, whose Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life (Random House) won the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. All four awards come with $10,000 purses.

Keith O’Brien’s Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose and the Last Glory Days of Baseball (Pantheon) received the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and Frank X. Walker’s Load in Nine Times (Liveright) won the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection. Both awards come with $5,000 purses.

In the awards’ two translation categories, Brian Robert Moore won the $3,000 PEN Translation Prize for his translation of Verdigris by Michele Mari (And Other Stories), and Mira Rosenthal won the $3,000 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for her translation of To the Letter by Tomasz Różycki (Archipelago).

The night also included the presentation of three career achievement awards. Mozambican author Mia Couto received the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature; Charles H. Rowell, founder of Callaloo, a journal celebrating writers and visual artists of the African diaspora, won the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing; and Lebanese American playwright Mona Mansour—whose Vagrant trilogy, a portion of which was performed at the ceremony, centers on a displaced Palestinian family—took home with the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award.

“It’s been very difficult to be an Arab American in theater these last couple of years. It's been very difficult to be a person these last couple of years,” Mansour said. “We have to keep speaking up.”

This article previously stated that the three announced finalists for the PEN/Jean Stein Award withdrew from consideration. They did not.