The 2021 PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony honors and celebrates remarkable literature, along with the writers, translators, editors, and publishers who helped these stories come to life. Dubbed by past host Seth Meyers as “the Oscars for books,” the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony will confer over $380,000 to writers and translators at all stages of their careers. Join us on April 8th for the live announcement of our book awards winners, selected from a list of 55 finalist books featuring outstanding voices in translation, fiction, poetry, science writing, essay, biography, drama, and more.
In collaboration with the Literary Action Coalition, PEN America will host a series of Instagram Lives featuring writers, activists, lawyers, and academics in conversation about the increased threats to protest rights. This series will delve deep into the importance of protest as a First Amendment right and explore how protest has been critical to the lives and liberation movements of Black and Indigenous communities and expand upon the role of the written and spoken word as protest.
The PEN Ten with Carribean Fragoza: “Place and story are always intimately connected in nearly all of my writing. . . I really believe that places where we live can play an enormous role in shaping us. I believe that while people belong to themselves, many of us also belong to a community, a neighborhood, a town, or a city."
The PEN Ten with Hanif Abdurraqib: “I’ve needed stories as a way to keep loved ones alive, as a way to contextualize histories, as a way to push back against things I was told to believe and accept.”
On Speaking Up and Questioning Authority with Lora Burnett: ”it’s a little bit chilling to say the least—and I think deliberately chilling—as in a deliberate attempt to chill free speech, for the college to single out three women for firing, when every statistic we have shows the losses that have accrued to women professionally, because of this pandemic and the sustained loss of jobs that are not coming back.”
Empowering Youth to Use Their Voices with Jessica Bohrer: ”One of the points that has been interesting to bring home with some of these children is that using your voice doesn't necessarily mean speaking and talking with your mouth out loud, and that there are lots of other ways to express things you care about and what's meaningful to you, what makes you feel good, what makes you feel bad."
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