Read more about the finalists and their works in all 11 categories here along with more details about the career honorees and information about ticket sales.
(NEW YORK)— PEN America today announced the finalists—literary legends and new voices spanning 11 genres— for its 2025 Literary Awards. The award ceremony on Thursday evening May 8—called the “Oscars for books”—will be hosted in New York City by two-time Emmy award-winning television host, journalist, and bestselling author Tamron Hall. PEN America will honor three writers for career achievement: Mozambican author Mia Couto will receive the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature; Lebanese American playwright Mona Mansour will be honored with the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award, and Charles H. Rowell, founder of Callaloo, a journal celebrating writers and visual artists of African descent worldwide, the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing.
Featuring dramatic readings and the indelible words of authors as they are celebrated on stage by their peers, the 2025 PEN America Literary Awards will take place at The Town Hall in midtown Manhattan. The ceremony will feature the Tony and Grammy Award-winning Broadway performer J. Harrison Ghee with musical direction by Ulysses Owens Jr., the three-time Grammy Award winning drummer.
The 2025 Literary Awards will confer a total prize purse of nearly $350,000 to writers and translators chosen for dynamic and thought-provoking works of literary excellence by panels of notable and award-winning authors, editors, critics and translators. Categories for the awards include the novel, nonfiction, short story collection, poetry, science writing, essay, biography, and translation.
Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, interim co-chief executive officer of PEN America and chief of literary programming, said: “Extraordinary books change our lives, compelling us to view the world through a new, often stunning lens. As books come under withering censorship across this country, we are excited to celebrate the freedom they represent, along with their power to spark compassion for others and move us to act with our hearts in troubling times. These exceptional writers, the stories they tell and the ideas they probe, build empathy and understanding— sorely needed today— and bring hope that these values will rule our thinking.”
Tamron Hall said: “Brilliant writing guides and inspires us and must be our north star or we will find ourselves emotionally and mentally undernourished. I am honored to join PEN America as host of this marvelous event to stand with and praise the writers of these beautiful and important prize-winning books of the past year. The freedom to write without fear must be protected. I’m honored to play a role in not only an evening like this but a movement that impacts generations to come.”
The finalists for literary awards include brilliant writers working at the cutting edge of ideas and style in contemporary fiction and nonfiction.
Among the finalists are:
Timothy Snyder, the acclaimed historian and public intellectual, was selected by judges for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for On Freedom, a New York Times bestseller. Snyder examines our great American commitment to freedom while arguing that we have lost sight of what it means, which is leading us into crisis. Snyder has been called “the leading interpreter of our dark times” with his words quoted in political protests worldwide and his numerous books inspiring films, sculpture, a punk rock song, a rap song, a play, and an opera. The Stein Award recognizes a book in any genre that has broken new ground and signals strong potential for lasting influence.
Venita Blackburn was nominated in two categories for her debut novel Dead in Long Beach, California. She is both a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. Blackburn is known for eloquent brevity in two acclaimed collections of short stories that explore characters grappling with the fallout of abandonment, unrequited desire and ill-conceived crimes. She has described Dead in Long Beach as “the hard crack of disaster in a family — and not getting any answers.” The PEN/Hemingway Prize for more than 45 years has signaled the arrival of exceptional new talent with past honorees including Jhumpa Lahiri, Ha Jin and Patricia Engel.
Historian Kali Nicole Gross is among the finalists for the Open Book Award, recognizing an exceptional work of any literary genre by an author of color, for Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women’s Fury in Lawless Times. The book examines Black women through history who fought back and not always nobly. She illuminates the stories of women who fought for justice and dignity, from the 19th century “badger thieves” who robbed men on the streets of Philadelphia to victims of intimate partner violence who defended their honor. Gross, who is on the faculty of Emory University, is co-author of A Black Women’s History of the United States.
In the same category, James B. Haile III is a finalist for The Dark Delight of Being Strange: Black Stories of Freedom, an experimental work combining elements of Black speculative fiction, Afro-surrealism, Black philosophy, and Black studies to think through the meaning and implications of Black freedom. The philosophy professor told Columbia University Press that his book began with a daydream in high school, which prompted two questions: “What if what we’ve thought about the past is all wrong?” And “If it is all wrong, what is needed to correct our mistaken views? “ His book probes the obvious answers, he said: “…we need to tell new stories, real stories that will at first seem impossible and outlandish… until they become ordinary and everyday.”
Historian Ana Raquel Minian is a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, selected for her critically acclaimed book, In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States. The narrative is vast in historical sweep, from the years of Chinese exclusion to the Holocaust, the Mariel boatlift, and Donald Trump’s family separation policy in his first term. The book tells the tragic and timely story of America’s often brutal treatment of noncitizens, including locking them up without charge.
The historian, columnist and foreign policy analyst Max Boot, in Reagan: His Life and Legend, tells the story of the 40th president as he emerged from his New Deal roots to become a practiced Red baiter and racist dog whistler before he grew into his role as optimistic elder statesman. Boot grew up idolizing Reagan but after a decade of research and interviews found himself asking whether his hero paved the way for Donald Trump, which led Boot to abandon the right. The book was nominated for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.
Poet Jenny George is a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection for two volumes— After Image and The Dream of Reason. After Image is her second collection and focuses on the death of her long-term partner, asking profound questions about life and death. George works in social justice philanthropy and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
At the ceremony, PEN America will confer the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature to eminent Mozambican author Mia Couto for his body of work. Couto is acclaimed for novels including his breakthrough Sleepwalking Land (1992), Confession of the Lioness (2012), and, most recently, the Sands of the Emperor trilogy (2015, 2016, and 2018), which was short-listed for the International Booker Prize in 2015. The PEN/Nabokov jury cited him for probing his homeland’s fraught history “as well as essential riddles of identity and existence.” Couto, who writes in Portuguese, has held “a singular place in the landscape of both African and world literature,” the judges wrote.
Mona Mansour will receive the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award, which recognizes a mid-career American playwright with an outstanding voice. Having started her career when she moved to New York City in the wake of 9/11, she has won critical praise and numerous awards for plays that have aimed to change the narrative around Arabs and Arab Americans. In a New York Times Critic’s Pick review of her Vagrant Trilogy at the Public Theater in 2022, Laura Collins-Hughes wrote, “Woven of poetry and politics, threaded with comedy, it’s Stoppardian in its intellectualism and doesn’t shy from poignancy.” The PEN/Laura Pels jury honors her for “deepening the range of stories seen on U.S. stages,” praising her “rigorous and compassionate writing, nuanced and complex characters, [and] artful structural composition.”
Dr. Charles H. Rowell will receive the $2,500 PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing for Callaloo, which he founded in 1976 at Southern University in Baton Rouge, LA. With its emphasis on critical studies of the arts and humanities, as well as creative writing, Callaloo has emerged as the most essential and continuously published journal of African American and African Diaspora Studies worldwide. Rowell’s own poems, interviews, and scholarly articles have appeared in a variety of periodicals, including The Southern Review and Agni. With Bruce Morrow, he was the co-editor of Shade: An Anthology of Fiction by Gay Men of African Descent (1996) and remembering the genius of Robert Hayden, Rowell edited Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African American Poetry (2012). Rowell is a native of Alabama, where his parents, as he proudly notes, “like the two generations that preceded them, were self-sufficient, land-owning farmers.”
All finalists and their works are announced here.
About PEN America
PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible. Learn more at pen.org.
Contacts: Suzanne Trimel, STrimel@PEN.org, 201-247-5057, Blake Zidell, Blake@BlakeZidell.com