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2019 PEN America Literary Awards Winners
These works were honored for being standouts across a spectrum of genres.
Published on February 28, 2019
Friday Black
Nana Kwame Adjei-BrenyahWinner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for its “originality, merit, and impact” and lauded as the breakout of 2018 by George Saunders, Roxane Gay, and Tommy Orange, this searing debut short story collection skillfully weaves together satire and magical realism with today’s most pressing, politically-charged issues to create otherworldly tales.
Heads of the Colored People: Stories
Nafissa Thompson-SpiresThis debut won the PEN Open Book Award, which goes to “an exceptional book-length work of any genre by an author of color, published in the United States.” The judges for the award said “a book this smart, funny, sly, charming, and devastating is a gift.”
Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
Ben GoldfarbThe judges eagerly awarded this one the PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for literary science writing. A beautiful tale of beavers and “a charming, surprising, and compelling lesson in the intricacies of ecosystems, and the limits of human hubris,” according to the judges.
The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey
Rowan Ricardo PhillipsThe 2017 men’s tennis season is lovingly rendered in this PEN/ESPN Award winner. The judges say “the book becomes a meditation on all things gorgeous and grave about the fragile human spirit and all it seeks to — and fails — to accomplish.”