Colson Whitehead, whose novel The Underground Railroad won the National Book Award for fiction in 2016, is up for yet another honour: the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.

Whitehead joins a list of five finalists vying for the the $75,000 US ($98,827.50 Cdn) award, which honours a book of any genre for its “originality, merit and impact.” The shortlisted books are:

  • The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
  • Dark Money by Jane Mayer
  • Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole
  • Olio by Tyehimba Jess
  • The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar

The winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award will be announced on March 27 at the 2017 PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony in New York.

PEN America’s annual literary prizes honour writing in a wide range of competitive categories. The 10 shortlists announced this week comprise 50 books.

The shortlist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, which comes with a purse of $25,000 US ($32,942.50 Cdn), includes:

  • Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
  • The Mothers by Brit Bennett
  • Insurrections by Rion Amilcar Scott
  • We Show What We Have Learned by Clare Beams
  • Hurt People by Cote Smith

The winner of this award will also be announced on March 27. It will be judged by Jami Attenberg, Tanwi Nandini Islam, Randall Kenan, Hanna Pylväinen and Akhil Sharma.

The five finalists for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, a $10,000 US ($13,177.00 Cdn) prize, are:

  • Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
  • The Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America by Patrick Phillips
  • Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones
  • Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran by Laura Secor
  • Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship by Anjan Sundaram

The nonfiction prize will be announced on February 22 and will be judged by Julia Angwin, Rich Benjamin, Jeff Biggers, Charles Duhigg, Marie Mutsuki Mockett, Lizzie Stark and Jessica Valenti.

Find out about all of the PEN America finalists, including the shortlists of the literary science and essay prizes, on their website.