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. 

On translating Marcelo Cohen

Through translation, inventive turns of phrase and expanded linguistic boundaries imbed themselves in our cultural consciousness like the very stories they tell, and it is from these mutations that… More

On translating Dagmara Kraus

Dagmara Kraus’s debut poetry collection, kummerang, is an exuberant investigation of a linguistically charged mind. The poems in kummerangrefuse to decide whether they will speak through sense or music,… More

On translating Qiu Miaojin

What makes Kerouac or Salinger timeless is not necessarily literary, but perhaps didactic: the fact that there is wisdom to be found at the fountain of youth, no matter… More

Three Poems

I admit, / I’m an unnecessarily handsome / knockabout, nightly drunk to no apparent / effect. But, it’s nice to be worried about. / It’s almost like being cared… More

Sunshine

They told Grace they’d found her curled into a nest of leaves, that since dawn they’d been following a strange spoor through the bush, and then, just as they’d… More

Glengarry Glen Ross

The Glengarry Highland’s leads, you’re sending Roma out. Fine. He’s a good man. We know what he is. He’s fine. All I’m saying, you look at the board, he’s… More

An Interview with Don DeLillo

Sinclair Lewis called for 'a literature worthy of our vastness.' A novelist tends to feel this spread and breadth in his fingertips (or not) and I’ve tried to bring… More