The PEN American Center on Tuesday announced the finalists for its 2016 PEN Literary Awards. Taken together, the prizes, fellowships and grants from the literary and human rights organization will confer $200,000 on writers, editors and translators this year.
Photo Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Sympathizer” is a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Sympathizer” is a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction.Credit Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times The most lucrative award, and one of the organization’s most prestigious, is the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, which comes with $25,000. This year’s finalists are “In the Country: Stories,” by Mia Alvar; “The Turner House,” by Angela Flournoy; “Mr. and Mrs. Doctor,” by Julie Iromuanya; “The Sympathizer,” by Viet Thanh Nguyen; and “Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness,” by Jennifer Tseng.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a finalist for the $10,000 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for “Between the World and Me,” which won the National Book Award for nonfiction in November. Other finalists for that award are “After the Tall Timber: Collected Nonfiction,” by Renata Adler; “The Quarry,” by Susan Howe; “The Givenness of Things: Essays,” by Marilynne Robinson; and “Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles,” by David L. Ulin.
The winners of those honors, along with the recipients of the prize for Literary Science Writing; the PEN Open Book Award, given to an exceptional book-length work by “an author of color”; and the PEN/Fusion Prize, honoring a writer under the age of 35 for an unpublished work of nonfiction that addresses a global and/or multicultural issue, will be announced on April 11 at a ceremony at the New School Auditorium. The winners of several other awards, including those for career achievement and for works in progress, will be announced on March 1.