Founded in 2016, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award recognizes a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact. This annual award goes to a book that breaks new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signals strong potential for lasting influence. A distinguished panel of judges nominates candidates internally. The author of the winning book receives a prize of $75,000 and is honored at the annual PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony in New York City.
All winners, finalists, and longlisted books are eligible to receive PEN America’s official emblems. If you are a publisher interested in obtaining a PEN America award emblem for use on a book cover, please write to [email protected].
For more information about PEN America’s Literary Awards, please visit our FAQ.
Submissions for the 2027 Literary Awards are now open! The deadline for submissions is August 1.
2026 Winner
To a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact, which has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting influence.
Winner: SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide, Cannupa Hanska Luger (Ayin Press)
Judges: Forrest Gander, Pam Houston, Kawai Strong Washburn
From the judges citation: “SURVIVA is a love song: to Earth, to community, to all who understand the only possible future is one that returns to Indigenous lifeways. What’s startling isn’t the dystopian charge—though that’s there—but the tenderness threaded through it, a choreography of care embedded in sharp surfaces. Multi-genre and multi-voiced, wholly devoted to the specificity of its observations, SURVIVA doesn’t imagine apocalypse as spectacle so much as it imagines endurance as relationship. Survival here is neither heroic nor solitary, but collective, improvised, and ethically burdened—an ongoing negotiation between Indigenous futurity, colonial debris, and the quiet insistence that something livable must still be made, even now.”
Previous Winners
2023
Judges: Lauren Groff, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Madeleine Thien
Percival Everett, Dr. No (Graywolf Press)
2022
Judges: Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Angie Cruz, Maurice Manning, Steph Opitz
Daisy Hernández, The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease (Tin House Books)
2021
Judges: Tommy Orange, Frederick Moten, Vievee Francis
Ross Gay, Be Holding: A Poem (University of Pittsburgh Press)
2020
Judges: Marilyn Chin, Garth Greenwell, Rebecca Makkai, Michael Schaub, William T. Vollmann
Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End (Random House)
2019
Judges: Jennifer Clement, Matthew Desmond, Natalie G Diaz, Brenda Shaughnessy, Charles Yu
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black (Mariner Books)
2018
Judges: Claudia Rankine, Margo Jefferson, Major Jackson, Paul Yamazaki
Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS (Graywolf Press)
2017
Judges: Sonali Deraniyagala, Carolyn Forché, Gregory Pardlo, Norman Rush, Deborah Treisman
Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (Penguin Random House)
Eligibility And Submission Guidelines
Candidates for this award are nominated by an esteemed panel of judges. Submissions are not accepted.
Who is Eligible?
- All nominated books must be published in the United States during the current calendar year.
- Books may be of any genre (fiction, memoir, a book-length essay or essay collection, general nonfiction, poetry).
- All nominated books must possess significant literary merit, illustrate great originality, and the promise of lasting influence.