PEN America is delighted to announce the 2025 literary grant winners for works-in-progress. Juried by panels of esteemed and award-winning writers, editors, translators, and critics who are committed to recognizing their contemporaries, these winning works-in-progress show the potential for lasting literary impact. The following grant winners will be supported as they continue their important work. We look forward to seeing these thought-provoking and challenging examples of literary excellence brought to the world.
Publishers, agents, and editors who wish to learn more about these projects are invited to contact the PEN America Literary Awards team at awards@pen.org.
PEN/Jean Stein Grants For Literary Oral History ($15,000)
The PEN/Jean Stein Grants for Literary Oral History recognize literary works of nonfiction that use oral history to illuminate an event, individual, place, or movement. The grants are made possible by a substantial contribution from American author and editor Jean Stein, whose groundbreaking work helped to popularize literary oral history. Since 2021, PEN America has conferred two grants with cash prizes of $15,000 each.
Judges: Adrian LeBlanc, Legs McNeil, Graham Rayman
Tina Dupuy, Moxie
Moxie, an oral history by Tina Dupuy, is the intergenerational story of what happens to two ambitious women who find themselves alone in New York City. Dupuy writes, “Men die sooner and/or leave. Children have their own lives. Friends are fleeting. Health can fail. Poverty is possible. It’s a universal fear and a stark reality: Devote your whole life to others but, at the end, you’re on your own.”
When the pandemic hits in 2020 and Dupuy’s husband leaves her, she becomes closer to her apartment neighbor, Sheila Sullivan (Moxie), a former Vegas showgirl in her 80s, by documenting Sullivan’s life.
The more Dupuy learns about how Moxie acted on Broadway, marched with Martin Luther King Jr. (in heels), viewed a nuclear explosion, and partied with Dr. Edward Teller and other “Architects of Armageddon”—the narrower the generational divide becomes. Patriarchy’s ageless assaults always deliver, and Dupuy begins to regain her own footing as she bears witness to the countless ways that Moxie found freedom and joy wherever she could. Moxie navigated her way through dreams and careers limited by mobsters, lecherous moguls, and scientists, and she must now plan for the end of her life. Dupuy joins her, and in doing so, continues to direct her own courageous life. Ultimately, Moxie is about the power of female friendship. These formidable women time travel from the gritty and glorious past to the urgent present, helping each other survive, alone, in the big city.
Katie Prout, Life and Death in the Loop
“I’m tired of seeing my friends die and some of the people I write about are my friends,” writes the journalist Katie Prout in “Life and Death on the Loop,” her years-long commitment to studying the challenges faced by the people on Chicago’s margins. Driven by this sense of mission, Prout immerses herself in the byways of the forgotten and finds remarkable people with powerful, moving stories about love, loss, friendship, and hope against the odds. Where most people take a snapshot, Prout films an entire movie. Through this immersion, Prout is able to capture a level of detail about the people and the landscape they inhabit that only emerges through long relationship building – the dust motes in the air at a run-down 100-year-old rooming house for men, her old friend, a subject Jeff consenting to share the meanings of his tattoos, the actual nuts and bolts of what those people most Americans just walk past do every day to survive. Without sugar-coating, Prout explores the tension between choice and circumstance by tracking the roadblocks, dead-ends and byzantine red tape that often cripples efforts to climb out of poverty or find health care. She is scrupulously honest with the reader when her mere presence requires her to, for example, give a few dollars to a subject or take them somewhere. Her work pays homage to the best use of oral history in telling stories that otherwise would never be written down in service of how American institutions fail the most vulnerable.
PEN/Phyllis Naylor Grant For Children’s And Young Adult Novelists ($5,000)
The PEN/Phyllis Naylor Grant for Children’s and Young Adult Novelists is offered annually to an author of children’s or young adult fiction for a novel-in-progress. The grant is made possible by a substantial contribution from PEN America Member and prolific author, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. The award was developed to help writers whose work is of high literary caliber and assist in the novel’s completion. The author of the winning manuscript is selected blindly by judges and will receive a $5,000 grant.
Judges: Arlyn Miller-Lachmann, Peter Lerangis, Jewell Parker Rhodes
Hugh “H.D.” Hunter, Rosewood
Rosewood is an ambitious Afro-surrealist fantasy-adventure novel that imagines an alternate history/universe for Rosewood, Florida, an actual small milling town ravaged by white supremacist terror in January 1923. Threading African-American history with a speculative vision, the author skillfully explores the conflict between ancient diaspora magic and the false protection of technology. The prose sings with southern oral rhythms and conjures the warmth and belonging of Black communities. Characterization is well-done and intriguing as the town folk battle against the white supremacist descendants intent on renewed terror and revenge. Magic and myth triumph over internal community regulations seeking to render the townsfolk defenseless against the Phantom, a magical being manifested by the supremacists. Rosewood promises to be an exciting new work expanding the canon of Afrofuturism.
PEN/Bare Life Review Grants ($5,000)
The PEN/Bare Life Review Grants support literary works in progress by immigrant and refugee writers, recognizing that the literature of migration is of inherent and manifest value. As of the 2024 grant conferral, PEN America confers two PEN/Bare Life Review Grants of $5,000 each.
The grants are made possible by a substantial contribution from The Bare Life Review, which celebrates world literature and has been a champion for migrant and diasporic arts.
Judges: Khadija Abdalla Bajaber, Ahmed Naji, Ofelia Montelongo, Achiro Olwoch
L Vocem – The Air Beneath Her Feet
The Air Beneath Her Feet is a powerful exploration of displacement, survival, and the precarious reality of living in exile. Though taking place during the first Trump presidency, its themes remain profoundly relevant today, capturing the fear, uncertainty, and resilience of immigrants navigating hostile systems. With prose that is deceptively simple yet deeply deliberate, the piece carries immense emotional weight, drawing the reader into the ongoing struggles of those forced to leave home. It is a story that pulses with urgency, refusing to be merely an intellectual or artistic exercise – it bears witness to the prolonged survival of the displaced. The work’s commitment to language as a cultural anchor is particularly striking, as the writer insists on making it available not only in English but also in Spanish, recognizing the over eight million Venezuelans living in the U.S., Europe, and South America. This decision speaks to the power of language as both a claim to identity and an act of resistance against erasure. The piece’s clarity of purpose, its ability to articulate both the hope and despair of being caught between catastrophe and catastrophe. More than just a depiction of struggle, The Air Beneath Her Feet insists on being heard, offering a raw and unflinching look at the realities of displacement in a world where true safety remains elusive.
María Isabel Álvarez – All the Ways We Ached for Home
This collection of stories is a deeply nuanced exploration of Guatemalan identity, generational trauma, and the search for belonging. Through precise, evocative prose, María Isabel weaves together narratives that transcend stereotypes, allowing her characters to exist with agency, longing, and joy while navigating the lingering effects of civil war. The collection captures the quiet resilience of motherhood and the interwoven struggles of immigrants, offering a stereotype-free portrayal of Guatemalan life. The book’s ability to balance vulnerability and resilience, illustrating how displacement and inherited trauma shape the human experience. One sentence, in particular, stands out: “Papi wasn’t born sad; he’d earned the right to feel melancholy. Images from Guatemala’s Civil War had seared into his cellular memory, so that wherever he walked, death walked with him.” This haunting line encapsulates the deep scars of war and exile, reinforcing how the collection is not only a reflection on loss, but also a testament to survival, memory, and the enduring ache for home.
PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants ($4000)
Now in their 22nd year, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants promote the publication and reception of translated world literature into English. Established by a gift from Priscilla and Michael Henry Heim in response to the dismayingly low number of literary translations appearing in English, the fund has supported more than 200 projects since its inception.
For the 2025 cycle, the judges reviewed applications from a wide array of languages of origin, genres, and time periods. Selected from this vast field of applicants are 10 projects, including Farsi, Japanese, Bulgarian, Croatian, and more. Each translator will receive a grant of $4,000 to support the translation’s completion.
Judges: Christopher Atamian, Elvira Blanco, Ezra Fitz, Denise Kripper, Yahia Lababidi, Elizabeth Lowe, Jenny McPhee, Mario Pereira
Izidora Angel’s translation from the Bulgarian of She Who Remains by Rene Karabash
“Am I dying or being born” contemplates the embattled protagonist with a noble and mournful dignity in this darkly fascinating and poetic novel about identity, gender, love and societal norms. Scriptwriter Karabash cinematically explores the inner and outer life of a woman who desperately transitions to a man by becoming a ‘sworn virgin’ in rural Albania, where women who take a vow of chastity can be accepted into society as men. The protagonist recognizes that she must die as a worthless woman to be reborn as a free man. In the subtle and capable translation of Angel, this sad tale unfolds in a painfully raw, stream-of-consciousness style, offering an engrossing glimpse into a remote Albanian village steeped in tradition. Yet, its exploration of patriarchal violence and trauma makes it culturally profound and relevant, universally, at a historical moment when many are struggling to understand the transgender experience and gender fluidity. Awarded the Elias Canetti prize—the highest literary prize in Bulgaria, a country historically at odds with LGBTQ+ rights— this novel has already gained international acclaim, with awards for its translations into French and English excerpts (also by Angel) as well as an upcoming film adaptation highlighting its global relevance.
Sean Manning’s translation from the Spanish of On Plants and Animals: A Literary Approach by Ida Vitale
Ida Vitale’s sixty short nonfiction essays that comprise On Plants and Animals offer a literary exploration of ecocriticism that weaves the author’s lifelong love of reading and writing literature with an appreciation of and commitment to nature and the environment through an exceptional breadth of topics and genres. In a dexterously creative translation that pays homage to Vitale’s natural wonder, Manning has captured captivating childlike amazement in this centenarian Uruguayan author. This translation is preceded only by a handful of other publications in English by this poet and overall master of writing (some also translated by Manning), and will hopefully reveal the need for more.
Arthur Reiji Morris’ translation from Japanese of The Moon Gallops Just as the Horse Gallops by Kohei Toyonaga
As William Faulkner once famously observed, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It is in this spirit that, nearly eighty years after the end of WWII, the young Okinawan author Kohei Toyonaga searches for his own way to grapple with the weight of history and the scars it has left on the present. In this ambitious debut novel, fourteen distinct characters tell their stories, taking the reader on a journey that crosses time and space. Toyonaga’s prose flows with the pace and force of a river—it’s a torrential monologue, really, reminiscent of Jon Fosse’s Septology. Arthur Reiji Morris’ translation is rollicking and free flowing as it follows the course of that river. A teenager’s story about telling his crush how he feels is slangy and casual, and yet, within a single sentence, it morphs into the recollections of a WWII veteran’s ghost, which are more formal, more orderly, more declarative in their precision. In Morris’ English, nothing about such a sharp change in register feels forced or jarring in any way. In fact, it reads as smoothly and seamlessly as water.
Hajar Hussaini’s translation from the Farsi of Death and His Brother by Khosraw Mani
Hajar Hussaini’s translation of Khosraw Mani’s 2017 Farsi-language novel Death and his Brother could not come at a more important time, as freedoms continue to be rolled back in Afghanistan by the Taliban, and not just for women. Neither this book nor any of Khosraw Mani’s five other novels have been translated into English, which makes Hussaini’s translation even more welcome. The novel depicts a single day in the lives of a few ordinary Kabul inhabitants. It starts off with a young man quietly sitting in a café in the Afghan capital; when a missile hits a house and kills four people, the reader sees how their worlds interconnect and how life can sometimes be deadlier than death itself. Told from multiple perspectives, this tragic story becomes one extended wail reminiscent of a Greek chorus. Experimental and daring, this is a book that everyone will enjoy, regardless of age or background. And rarely of late have we had a text from Persian so skillfully translated and which conveys the beauty of the original text in English. An important voice from a part of the world that Americans know very little about, apart from State Department-released stereotypes and racist tropes.
Lily Schwalb’s translation from the French of Who Speaks in the Name of Jasmine? by Venus Khoury-Galas
The 1980 Qui parle au non du jasmin? by French-Lebanese writer Vénus Khoury-Ghata is an important book of verse, translated into English for the first time by Lily Schwalb. Nature and religion commune here to express the poet’s existential nihilism in rich and sensitive verse. The work infuses nature with religious symbolism and nihilism. The sister of fellow author May Manessa and born into a prominent Maronite family, Khoury-Galas is the author of several well-received books. Not for nothing, she is also the 1959 Miss Beirut. The polyglot author of “Terres Stagnantes” and “Chez Seghers,“ recipient of the of the Grand Prix de Poésie de l’Académie Française and the 2011 Prix Goncourt, Khoury-Galas tenderly writes: “Tu es ma robe de caresses mon foulard de tendresse/ ma ceinture de baisers tes gestes moulin à vent/ tes cils épis de blé et le rire se pétrit dans la cuve de ta bouche/ tu es mon pain joufflu m a lisse un nid.” Along with Nada Tuéni and Etel Adnan, Khoury-Galas belongs to a group of brilliant twentieth century Lebanese women who have had to witness internal forces and outside enemies devastate their homeland. Lily Schwalb’s translation skillfully reproduces the melody and beauty of the original verse by Khoury-Ghata. For Venus-Khoury and her colleagues, poetry and art have been their answer to both, each book they have write a love letter to Lebanon and to humanity as a whole.”
Hannah V. Warren’s translation from the German of Europa by Alexandra Bernhardt
Bernhardt’s Europaia (2021), translated as Europa, is a collection of fifty poems in ten sections written in a revisionist epic tradition, that reveal the author’s struggles with her post-war identity as a German citizen. More broadly, the poems explore Europe’s shifting cultural identities, from Icelandic histories to Greco-Roman mythologies, presenting the mosaic of locations and personalities that form the European character. The focus of Europa is on finding the other, which is a legacy of the European continent. Each of the ten sections is presented in a different poetic style, including both traditional and experimental forms. Hannah Warren brilliantly transposes Bernhard’s deconstruction and restructuring of Middle High German dialect and unique compound words in some of the poems into a rich and complex verbal skein derived from Middle English. She carefully emulates Bernhardt’s practice of linking language and ideas with the purpose of providing a deeper appreciation for how the global “other” alters the reader’s own cultural, social, linguistic, and political context.
Sylvia Franke’s translation from the German of All the Good Guys Were Dead by Gerasimos Bekas
This irreverent debut novel (Alle Guten waren tot, 2018) is a tragi-comic road trip novel which tells the story of Aris, a young Greek-German in his early twenties, who struggles with his realization that he has no control over his life. It is the situation of disinherited youth in modern German society, who cannot gain economic or social traction. The author allows us to follow Aris through the bleak streets and taverns of his cold, drab town in southern Germany and then on a trip to Greece, where he is commissioned by a patient in the nursing home that he works in to deliver a secret briefcase to her granddaughter. But Athens is also a crushing disappointment, and only accentuates his sense of disconnection. The author employs dramatic structure to evoke ancient Greek theater with a prologue and epilogue. The tragic elements are offset by slapstick comedy that highlights the harsh reality of displacement of migrants in today’s Germany, as well as the intractable problems of Greece, a country that has been denied participation in European prosperity. Sylvia Franke’s translation captures the tragic and comic elements of this work with a keen ear for register and pacing in the narrative, as well as a sharp eye for telling detail. Her abundant rendition does justice to a bold and spirited book.
V. B. Borjen’s translation from the Croatian of Cherries by Nataša Skazlić
Nataša Skazlić’s debut novel Cherries is a haunting meditation on death, memory, and trauma set in 1970s Istria. Told through the posthumous reflections of a young girl, the story unravels the mysteries surrounding her death, the violence she endured, and the shattered innocence of her childhood. In an evocative translation, V. B. Borjen brings Skazlić’s elegant prose and emotional depth vividly to life, capturing both the novel’s quiet beauty and its stark portrayal of betrayal, victimhood, and societal silence. Blending personal and historical narratives, Cherries explores Yugoslavia’s tumultuous past, the looming shadow of Tito, and the enduring legacy of repression and violence. Borjen’s masterful rendering recreates the sensory richness of Skazlić’s language, offering a deeply resonant exploration of trauma and recovery. This poignant translation firmly establishes Cherries as a vital contribution to contemporary world literature.
Tamina Hauser’s translation from the Korean of Eul by Bak Solmay
In Bak Solmay’s debut novel, Eul, a Korean teacher; Minjoo, her much younger boyfriend; Franny and Zooey, cousins and lovers fleeing their families’ disapproval; and Xian, an observant housekeeper, find their lives intersecting within the confines of a hotel for long-term stays. Disenchanted with the outside world, Solmay’s secluded characters embark on an inward journey where intimacy and unspoken communication become the ultimate pursuit. When a gunshot disrupts this uneasy community, buried tensions emerge, exposing the intricacies of love, the complexity of relationships, and the delicate balance of human connections. Eul (2010) unfolds as a subdued, at times languid narrative (following, in the translator’s words, a pace that feels like no pace at all), punctuated by temporal shifts and fragmented dialogue. Through Tamina Hauser’s elegant translation, Solmay invites readers into an ephemeral web of relations rendered with precision and grace.
Madison Felman-Panagotacos’ translation from the Spanish of The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest by Alejandra Kamiya
The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest, a collection of twelve delicate stories by the Japanese-Argentine writer Alejandra Kamiya, blends the beautiful and the disturbing aspects of ordinary life. Kamiya’s distinctive prose says as little as possible to illuminate silent emotions. With disquieting precision and moving brevity, Kamiya crafts narratives that subtly explore what is named, what is spoken, and, perhaps most important, what is left unsaid. Madison Felman-Panagotacos’s translation conveys this vivid narrative universe, capturing the tension and distress characterizing the first-generation experience between Argentina and Japan and the features of hyphenate identity and inter-generational difference. Both distinctive and universal, these stories range among studies of tenderness and cruelty, violent masculinity, childhood innocence, parenthood, and the durability of friendship.
PEN Grant For The English Translation Of Italian Literature ($5,000)
Administered under and judged alongside the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants, the PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature honors a translator for a book-length translation of narrative prose and seeks to promote the publication of Italian literature into English. The winner will receive a $5,000 grant to aid in the project’s completion.
Judges: Christopher Atamian, Elvira Blanco, Ezra Fitz, Denise Kripper, Yahia Lababidi, Elizabeth Lowe, Jenny McPhee, Mario Pereira
Beth Hickling-Moore’s translation from the Italian of Arcade by Alessandra Mureddu
Arcade (Azzardo) by Alessandra Mureddu is an unflinching work of autofiction exploring addiction, family trauma, and the societal obsession with instant gratification. The novel follows the narrator, also named Alessandra, as she attempts to “save” her father, a pathological gambler, only to find herself trapped emotionally and financially in the same perilous cycle. Soon she, too, is lost in the cold, mechanical world of slot machines. The protagonist’s relationship with her father, as well as her experiences with abusive men, paints a brutal portrait of how addiction interlaces with power dynamics and self-destruction, particularly within the context of a male-dominated gambling world. The novel brilliantly portrays a gamified society that commodifies even the most personal aspects of human life. Beth Hickling-Moore’s translation captures the raw urgency of Mureddu’s prose. Through careful attention to the nuances of addiction and the haunting repetition of routine, Hickling-Moore brings to life the narrator’s inner turmoil and the dehumanizing effects of the gambling world. The translation’s precision maintains the tension of the original text, while allowing the emotional weight to resonate in English with a palpable sense of dread and inevitability. The non-linear structure of the novel—alternating Alessandra’s path towards addiction with painful childhood memories—has been deftly mirrored in English, preserving the novel’s unsettling rhythm.
