PEN America announced the finalists for the 2017 PEN America Literary Awards in several categories where US$315,000 is awarded. Those in the running include Petina Gappah, Teju Cole, Yaa Gyasi, Helen Oyeyemi, and Abdellatif Laâbi.
PEN American hands out awards in very many categories of writing. The categories that interest us are the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award worth $75,000 that recognizes a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact. Then there is the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction worth $25,000 to an author whose debut work represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise. There is PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay worth $10,000 and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation worth $3,000 for a book-length translation of poetry into English.
Here is the list of those in the running for the big bucks in the categories that they belong in.
PEN Open Book Award
The Book of Memory
Petina Gappah
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
Helen Oyeyemi
Riverhead Books/Penguin Random House
PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Known and Strange Things
Teju Cole
Random House
PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction
Homegoing
Yaa Gyasi
Alfred A Knopf/Penguin Random
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Known and Strange Things
Teju Cole
Random House
PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
In Praise of Defeat: Poems
Abdellatif Laâbi
Archipelago Books
translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith
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