Here are the winners of the 2016 PEN Literary Awards

Your reading list just got a whole lot longer.
 By 
MJ Franklin
 on 
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Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Your reading list just got a whole lot longer.

On Monday night, PEN America honored incredible new literature at the 2016 PEN Literary Awards ceremony. This year, the ceremony was hosted by Poet Laureate of Brooklyn Tina Chang.


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"We are here tonight to celebrate the writers and literary translators who inspire us with their skill, talent and passion," said Monique Truong, writer and chair of the PEN Literary Award committee, at the event.

"We celebrate them because they remind us all that writers and and translators are integral to our social fabric. They are the weavers and their ideas are the most colorful of threads."

Prizes were given out to a host of writers across all genres including fiction, sports writing and translation. Check out the full list of winners below.

PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction

Winner: Toni Morrison

PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, Founded by Barbara Kingsolver

Winner: Lisa Ko for The Leavers

PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Awards

Master American Dramatist: Lynn Nottage

American Playwright in Mid-Career: Young Jean Lee

Emerging American Playwright: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing

Winner: The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball's Lost Triumph by Scott Ellsworth

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

Molina: The Story of the Father Who Raised an Unlikely Baseball Dynasty by Bengie Molina with Joan Ryan

The Grind: Inside Baseball's Endless Season by Barry Svrluga

PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing

Winner: John Schulian

PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

Winner: Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art by Nancy Princenthal

The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects by Deborah Lutz

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/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship

Winner: Ash Parsons for A Chemical Distance

PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry

Winner: Ed Roberson

PEN Translation Prize

Winner: 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

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

PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

Winner: The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa, translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu

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

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

PEN/Edward and Lily Tuck Award for Paraguayan Literature

Winner: Nathalia María Echauri Castagnino for Doce Lunas Llenas: Poesias sobre la Divina Energia Femenina

PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction

Winner: In the Country: Stories by Mia Alvar

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy

Mr. and Mrs. Doctor by Julie Iromuanya

The Sympathizer: A Novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness by Jennifer Tseng

PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Winner: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

After the Tall Timber: Collected Non-Fiction by Renata Adler

The Quarry by Susan Howe

The Givenness of Things: Essays

by Marilynne Robinson

Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles by David L. Ulin

PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

Winner: Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future by Lauren Redniss

Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett

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

Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of a Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World by Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe

PEN Open Book Award

Winner: Chord by Rick Barot

Bastards of the Reagan Era by Reginald Dwayne Betts

Forest Primeval: Poems by Vievee Francis

Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape by Lauret Savoy

PEN/FUSION Emerging Writers Prize

Winner: Jean Guerrero for Crux

Victoria Blanco for Visions of Oasis

Laurel Fantauzzo for Archipelago Sleepovers

Jaclyn Moyer for The Girl Outside My Window

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MJ Franklin

MJ Franklin was an Assistant Editor at Mashable and a host of the MashReads Podcast.

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