PEN America is honored to host the 61st annual Literary Awards Ceremony at Town Hall. This year’s ceremony will be hosted by two-time Emmy Award-winning television host Tamron Hall. With performances by performer, producer and educator Ulysses Owens Jr., Tony Award and Grammy Award winner J. Harrison Ghee, stage and screen actor Raffi Barsoumian, and award-winning actor, director, and producer Caitlin Nasema Cassidy.
This year, we will be honoring Mozambican author Mia Couto with the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, Lebanese-American playwright Mona Mansour with the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award, and Callaloo founder Charles H. Rowell with the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing.
Our awards are juried by panels of esteemed, award-winning authors, editors, translators, and critics. These authors are committed to recognizing their contemporaries, from promising debut writers to those who have already had a continuous and lasting impact on the literary landscape.
The 2025 Literary Awards will confer nearly $350,000 to writers and translators. Spanning fiction, poetry, essay, translation, and more, these books are dynamic, diverse, and thought-provoking examples of literary excellence.
