Founded in 2016, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award is an annual award which recognizes a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact, which has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting influence. A distinguished panel of judges will nominate candidates internally. The author of the winning book receives a prize of $75,000 and is honored at the annual PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony in New York City.
All winners, finalists, and longlisters for this award are eligible to receive PEN America’s official emblems. If you are a publisher and interested in obtaining PEN America’s award emblem, please write to [email protected].
2026 Winner
To a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact, which has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting influence.
Winner: SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide, Cannupa Hanska Luger (Ayin Press)
From the judges citation: “SURVIVA is a love song: to Earth, to community, to all who understand the only possible future is one that returns to Indigenous lifeways. What’s startling isn’t the dystopian charge—though that’s there—but the tenderness threaded through it, a choreography of care embedded in sharp surfaces. Multi-genre and multi-voiced, wholly devoted to the specificity of its observations, SURVIVA doesn’t imagine apocalypse as spectacle so much as it imagines endurance as relationship. Survival here is neither heroic nor solitary, but collective, improvised, and ethically burdened—an ongoing negotiation between Indigenous futurity, colonial debris, and the quiet insistence that something livable must still be made, even now.”
History
Previous Winners
2023: Dr. No, Percival Everett (Graywolf Press)
2021: Ross Gay for Be Holding: A Poem (University of Pittsburgh Press)
2020: Yiyun Li for Where Reasons End (Random House)
2019: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah for Friday Black (Mariner Books)
2018: Layli Long Soldier for WHEREAS (Graywolf Press)
2017: Hisham Matar for The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (Penguin Random House)
Eligibility And Submission Guidelines
Please note that candidates for this award will be nominated internally by a panel of judges. Nominations will not be accepted.
Who is Eligible?
- Must be published in the United States.
- May be of any genre (fiction, memoir, essay, general nonfiction, poetry)
- Must possess significant literary merit, illustrate great originality, and possess strong potential for lasting influence.