PEN America announced the winners of its annual literary awards with Daisy Hernández, Torrey Peters, and Tiya Miles among the authors taking home prizes.
The winners were announced at a ceremony Monday night in New York, hosted by late night talk show host Seth Meyers.
Hernández won the night’s biggest prize, the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, for The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease. Hernández’s book was honored last month by the National Book Foundation’s new Science + Literature program.
Peters took home the PEN/Hemingway Award, given to a debut novel, for Detransition, Baby. The book is also a finalist for the Gotham Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for best first book.
Miles’ All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family’s Keepsake, a Kirkus Prize finalist and National Book Award winner, won the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, while Rebecca Donner’s All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler, also a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, took home the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.
Yoon Choi won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection for Skinship, and Divya Victor claimed the PEN Open Book Award for Curb.
A full list of winners is available on the PEN America website.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
