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.
Comes the Silence
The last part of a story is the silence / That comes at the end. / A time to think, to reflect. / The drums are still now. /… More
Free Verse
When I wake up, it’s thunder storming and I stay in the culvert, which is getting more and more filled with water. It’s like the day when Michael did… More
The Beautiful and the Damned
The arms dealer’s wife joined us soon after we sat down. She too was from the northeast, from a ramshackle border town in Assam where I had last been… More
Versos de amor y locura
Déjame que te cuente las palabras. / Somos los hijos de los rojos versos / que vuelan cuando está la noche encima. / Qué pálidos amantes, pues nos vemos… More
The Spanish Illness
Many had come from the four corners of the globe and had no way to prove the purity of their blood, or their past; in the best of … More
56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports
People were also listening over in the Mission District, at the Double Play lounge and in the smoke shop outside Seals Stadium. And they were listening, as ever, in… More
Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them
MAN: Yeah, that’s what you said last night. I hope you’re not going to repeat yourself a lot in our marriage. That would be a drag. FELICITY: Well… More
Oil on Water
So, yes, there was an accident, a fire. An explosion in the barn with the oil drums. The fire flew on the wind from house to house, and in… More
Poems from Water Puppets
I will admit I was in favor of war and now look what’s happened. / At the end of the road the man driving the truck will eat /… More
Sophia’s Childhood
Her rejection as a child helps to explain her constant search as a woman for what she had missed. Even as Empress Catherine, at the height of her autocratic… More
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