The PEN Literary Award season is finally here.
PEN American Center kicked off its PEN Literary Award season this week by announcing this year's longlist of award finalists.
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Each year, the PEN Literary Awards honors the best new books written in fiction, science writing, essays, sports writing, biography, children’s literature, translation, drama and poetry.
"Once again, we recognize writers whose careers are just budding as well as those who are deservedly renowned, those who are undiscovered as well as those who are widely acclaimed," PEN American Center President Andrew Solomon said in a press release.
Check out the longlist for the announced categories below.
PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction
In the Country: Stories by Mia Alvar
The Boatmaker by John Benditt
Did You Ever Have A Family by Bill Clegg
Hausfrau: A Novel by Jill Alexander Essbaum
The Turner House by Angela Flournoy
Mr. and Mrs. Doctor by Julie Iromuanya
The Sympathizer: A Novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Given World: A Novel by Marian Palaia
It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides by Jessica Lee Richardson
Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness by Jennifer Tseng
PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
After the Tall Timber: Collected Non-Fiction by Renata Adler
This Old Man: All in Pieces by Roger Angell
Our Only World: Ten Essays by Wendell Berry
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Quarry by Susan Howe
Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader by Linda Nochlin
The Givenness of Things: Essays by Marilynne Robinson
Reporting Always: Writings from The New Yorker by Lillian Ross
The Life of Images: Selected Prose by Charles Simic
Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles by David L. Ulin
PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
The Man Who Wasn’t There: Investigations Into the Strange New Science of the Self by Anil Ananthaswamy
Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett
Black Hole: How an Idea Abandoned by Newtonians, Hated by Einstein, and Gambled On by Hawking Became Loved by Marcia Bartusiak
The End of Plenty: The Race to Feed a Crowded World by Joel K. Bourne Jr.
The Boy Who Played with Fusion: Extreme Science, Extreme Parenting, and How to Make a Star by Tom Clynes
The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults by Frances E. Jensen, MD with Amy Ellis Nutt
Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry by Jeffrey A. Lieberman, MD with Ogi Ogas
Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time—and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything by George Musser
Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future by Lauren Redniss
Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World by Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe
PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing
Not a Game: The Incredible Rise and Unthinkable Fall of Allen Iverson by Kent Babb
The Domino Diaries: My Decade Boxing with Olympic Champions and Chasing Hemingway’s Ghost in the Last Days of Castro’s Cuba by Brin-Jonathan Butler
The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui’s Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory by Julie Checkoway
The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball’s Lost Triumph by Scott Ellsworth
The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse by Molly Knight
Concussion by Jeanne Marie Laskas
Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty by Charles Leerhsen
Molina: The Story of the Father Who Raised an Unlikely Baseball Dynasty by Bengie Molina with Joan Ryan
Sports and Labor in the United States by Michael Schiavone
The Grind: Inside Baseball’s Endless Season by Barry Svrluga
PEN Open Book Award
Chord by Rick Barot
Bastards of the Reagan Era by Reginald Dwayne Betts
Forest Primeval: Poems by Vievee Francis
It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time: Poems by Angela Jackson
God Loves Haiti: A Novel by Dimitry Elias Léger
Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey by Marie Mutsuki Mockett
The Pink Box: Poems by Yesenia Montilla
The Blind Writer: Stories and a Novella by Sameer Pandya
Heaven: Poems by Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy
PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography
In Search of Sir Thomas Browne: The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth Century's Most Inquiring Mind by Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Joan of Arc: A History by Helen Castor
Sinatra: The Chairman by James Kaplan
The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects by Deborah Lutz
Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press by James McGrath Morris
Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art by Nancy Princenthal
Eqbal Ahmad: Critical Outsider in a Turbulent Age by Stuart Schaar
John le Carré: The Biography by Adam Sisman
Michelle Obama: A Life by Peter Slevin
Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva by Rosemary Sullivan
PEN Translation Prize
The Sound of Our Steps by Ronit Matalon, translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu
The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson
The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin, translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell
Nowhere to Be Found by Bae Suah, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell
The Game for Real by Richard Weiner, translated from the Czech by Benjamin Paloff
Sphinx by Anne Garréta, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, translated from the Russian by Oliver Ready
The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel
Hollow Heart by Viola Di Grado, translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar
Paris Nocturne by Patrick Modiano, translated from the French by Phoebe Weston-Evans
PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
The Country of Planks by Raúl Zurita, translated from the Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky
Oxen Rage by Juan Gelman, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Rose Bradford
The School of Solitude: Collected Poems by Luis Hernández, translated from the Spanish by Anthony Geist
The Late Poems of Wang An-shih, translated from the Chinese by David Hinton
Twelve Stations by Tomasz Różycki, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston
Rilke Shake by Angélica Freitas, translated from the Portuguese by Hilary Kaplan
I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky, translated from the Russian by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev
The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa, translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu
Silvina Ocampo, translated from the Spanish by Jason Weiss
Uyghurland, the Furthest Exile by Ahmatjan Osman, translated from the Uyghur and Arabic by Jeffrey Yang with the author