PEN America Names 2019 Literary Awards Finalists

PEN America announced the finalists for its 2019 Literary Awards.

Debut works and small presses dominate the shortlist. More than 50% of the works being considered for awards across genres and categories, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, and performance, were published by small presses or are debut works. This year, PEN America will confer 22 distinct awards, fellowships, grants, and prizes in 2019, awarding more than $370,000 to writers and translators.

Two debut works are up for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the award with the largest prize at $75,000: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s short story collection Friday Black (Mariner Books) and José Olivarez’s poetry collection Citizen Illegal (Haymarket Books). They are joined by Educated by Tara Westover (Random House), The Carrying: Poems by Ada Limón (Milkweed Editions), and The Overstory by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton & Company). 

The PEN/Bingham Prize, focused for the first time on debut short story collections, confers a $25,000 prize, and is the only award in the U.S. exclusively for debut collections. The finalists are Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s White Dancing Elephants (Dzanc Books), Jamel Brinkley’s A Lucky Man: Stories (Graywolf Press), and Akil Kumarasamy’s Half Gods (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

The PEN/Hemingway Award, refocused this year on debut novels, comes with a $25,000 prize, and each finalist receives a residency at UCross. The finalists are Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (Grove Press), Meghan Kenny’s The Driest Season: A Novel (W.W. Norton & Company), Ling Ma’s Severance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Tommy Orange’s There There: A Novel (Alfred A. Knopf), and Nico Walker’s Cherry: A Novel (Alfred A. Knopf).

This year, PEN America has forged a relationship with Hudson Booksellers, the travelers’ local bookstore, with over 450 stores in 83 airports worldwide. As part of this partnership, selections from the shortlist will be available for purchase at stores and online at a 25 percent discount.

Announcements for the following career achievement awards, presented at the PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony on February 26, are forthcoming: the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature, PEN/Osterweil Award for Poetry, PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, PEN/Pels Theater Award, PEN/Magid Award for Excellence in Editing, the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. PEN America’s award for novel-length debut fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Award, will be celebrated in April in a ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, Mass.

Winners of the book awards will be revealed at the February 26 Literary Awards Ceremony at the NYU Skirball Center. Tickets are available here. Tickets to the Literary Awards Ceremony, where winners will be announced live, are available here. The full 2019 PEN America Literary Award shortlists, and more information about the Literary Awards program, are available here.