Featured Honorees
PEN America Literary Awards honorees have produced some of the most exceptional literary works of the past 50 years. Read interviews with or excerpts of work by featured authors and translators below.
Author Morgan Talty Welcomes New Son and PEN America Literary Award
Author Morgan Talty won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for a debut short story collection days after his wife gave birth to their first child. More
‘Literature lasts’: Erika Dickerson-Despenza basks in career achievement award
For Erika Dickerson-Despenza, receiving the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award meant something special – an honor for words on the page. More
Four Questions for Simon Armitage, Winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
For the first time in my life I was bilingual, even if I could only communicate with people who had been dead for half a millennium. More
Four Questions for Tess Lewis, Winner of the 2017 PEN Translation Prize
I always read my drafts out loud when I’m polishing them—I find it easier to hear mistakes or awkward passages than to 'see' them. More
Four Questions for Katrina Dodson, Winner of the 2016 PEN Translation Prize
I’ve thought often about how translation requires extreme humility, to be able to recede into the shadows and let one’s style be subsumed by another’s. Translators work hard not… More
Four Questions for Sawako Nakayasu, Winner of the 2016 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
"The Sagawa book presented a special challenge, which was that the Modernist sensibility and language, especially in this particular Japanese context, was unlike anything I had ever seen, and… More
Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness
He sounded older, twenty at least. I was afraid if we spoke again he would sound older still, that by month’s end he would have surpassed me, his… More
The Sympathizer
The month in question was April, the cruelest month. It was the month in which a war that had run on for a very long time would lose its… More
A Contract Overseas
With Andoy unemployed and my mother scraping to feed us, I couldn't go straight to college, even with a scholarship. We both spent the next twelve months mopping floors More
Mr. and Mrs. Doctor
“What is this talk of happy?” Aunty asked without turning. Then, gently, she added, “You have been in America too long, Mrs. Doctor.” More
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