Make room on your to-be-read list. On Thursday, PEN America announced its lists of finalists for the 2018 PEN Literary Awards.
Each year, the PEN Literary Awards honors great new literature in fiction and a wide array of non-fiction, including sports writing, science writing, essays, and more. Past winners have included Matthew Desmond's deep dive into eviction practices in the U.S. Evicted and Helen Oyeyemi's fable-inspired short story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours (which was also a MashReads favorite).
This year's finalists are just as rich and compelling. Finalists for the 2018 PEN Literary Awards include the late Ursula Le Guin's essay collection No Time To Spare, Carmen Maria Machado's acclaimed short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, which was also a finalist in the 2017 National Book Awards, as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay collection We Were Eight Years In Power. If Coates wins, it will mark his second PEN Literary Award, after he won the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for his book Between The World And Me in 2015.
These breakout books aren't the only titles that make the 2018 PEN Literary Awards exceptional. This year's finalist list also shines a spotlight on exceptional, diverse authors. In addition to the PEN's annual Open Book Award, which honors books written by authors of color, two other categories are composed entirely of minority authors: for the first time ever the finalist list for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction is composed of all women and the finalist list for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award is composed entirely of authors of color.
"It is fitting that our Literary Awards this year spotlight five new women's voices in fiction as well as a dazzling diversity of writers for our flagship Stein prize and in other categories," said PEN America Executive Director Suzanne Nossel in a press release. "PEN America's Literary Awards celebrate some of the greatest fruits of free expression—stories that inspire, spark empathy, and change minds. At a time when the fabric of our discourse is being torn by polarization, technological change, and political upheaval, literature has the power to help us see past impasse and imagine a different future."
Check out the finalist list below, and stay tuned for the winners to be revealed on Feb. 20.
PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction
Sonora
Hannah Lillith Assadi
Black Jesus and Other Superheroes: Stories
Venita Blackburn
Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
Carmen Maria Machado
History of Wolves
Emily Fridlund
Sour Heart
Jenny Zhang
PEN Open Book Award
A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa
Alexis Okeowo
My Soul Looks Back: A Memoir
Jessica B. Harris
Augustown
Kei Miller
Ordinary Beast: Poems
Nicole Sealey
Lessons on Expulsion: Poems
Erika L. Sánchez
PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
Lindsey Fitzharris
American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World
David Baron
Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life
David Montgomery
No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America
Ron Powers
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Robert Sapolsky
PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
Richard Nixon: The Life
John Farrell
Grant
Ron Chernow
Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror
Victor Sebestyen
Chester B. Himes: A Biography
Lawrence P. Jackson
You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn
Wendy Lesser
PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing
The Arena: Inside the Tailgating, Ticket-Scalping, Mascot-Racing, Dubiously Funded, and Possibly Haunted Monuments of American Sport
Rafi Kohan
Sting Like a Bee: Muhammad Ali vs. the United States of America, 1966–1971
Leigh Montville
City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles
Jerald Podair
Bones: Brothers, Horses, Cartels, and the Borderland Dream
Joe Tone
Ali: A Life
Jonathan Eig
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks & Other Mixed Messages
Carina Chocano
Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London
Lauren Elkin
Alpine Apprentice: A Memoir
Sarah Gorham
No Time To Spare
Ursula K. Le Guin
Because It Is So Beautiful: Unraveling the Mystique of the American West
Robert Reid
PEN Translation Prize
The Book of Emma Reyes
Emma Reyes, translated from the Spanish by Daniel Alarcón
A Horse Walks into a Bar
David Grossman, translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen
Out in the Open
Jesús Carrasco, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa
The Impossible Fairy Tale
Han Yujoo, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong
Katalin Street
Magda Szabó, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix
PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award
White Tears
Hari Kunzru
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Whereas
Layli Long Soldier
Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists
Kevin Young
The Changeling
Victor LaValle
Topics Books
