The literary nonprofit PEN America revealed the winners of its annual literary awards at a ceremony in New York on Thursday evening hosted by actor and author Kal Penn.
Percival Everett took home the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Award, given to “a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact,” for his novel Dr. No. The book is also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
“For the last 30 years I’ve had one agent [who] told me when we first started working together, ‘You’re never going to make me any money, so just write what you want to write,’ ” Everett said in his acceptance speech. “It was perhaps not well-advised, but I did.”
The PEN Open Book Award, given to a book in any genre by an author of color, went to Hafizah Augustus Geter for The Black Period, while Oscar Hokeah took home the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel for Calling for a Blanket Dance.
Morgan Talty was named the winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, awarded to a debut short story collection, for Night of the Living Rez. The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction went to Eve Fairbanks for The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning. Florence Williams won the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award for Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey.
Actor and screenwriter Tina Fey (30 Rock) was presented with the PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award. In her acceptance speech, she said, “It’s a pleasure to be here accepting an award named after the great Mike Nichols…. You could have called this award the ‘Bitch, You Are No Mike Nichols Award’ and I still would have gladly shown up and accepted it just to have my name in proximity with his career.”
A full list of winners is available at PEN America’s website.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
