Congrats to the 2022 PEN America Literary Awards finalists

Here are the finalists for the 2022 PEN America Literary Awards!

There are fifty-five contenders total in eleven categories; the winners will be revealed at a ceremony February 28.

You can see the significance of each award, plus its judges and monetary value, on PEN America's announcement page.

PEN America describes itself as the nation’s foremost literary and free expression organization.

PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

• The President and The Frog, by Carolina De Robertis

• The Trees: A Novel, by Percival Everett 

• The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease, by Daisy Hernández 

• Milk Blood Heat, by Dantiel W. Moniz

• Harrow, by Joy Williams 

PEN Open Book Award

• Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, by Rebecca Hall 

• Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir, by Rajiv Mohabir 

• Names for Light: A Family History, by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint

• Curb, by Divya Victor

• White Magic, by Elissa Washuta

PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection

• Skinship: Stories, by Yoon Choi 

• Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, by Carribean Fragoza 

• Milk Blood Heat, by Dantiel W. Moniz 

• Objects of Desire: Stories, by Clare Sestanovich 

• Give My Love to the Savages: Stories, by Chris Stuck 

PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel 

• Burnt Sugar, by Avni Doshi 

• Dear Miss Metropolitan, by Carolyn Ferrell

• The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

• Detransition, Baby, by Torrey Peters

• The Five Wounds, by Kirstin Valdez Quade 

PEN/Voelcker Award For Poetry Collection 

• Yellow Rain: Poems, by Mai Der Vang

• Sho, by Douglas Kearney

• Heard-Hoard, by Atsuro Riley

• frank: sonnets, by Diane Seuss

• Mutiny, by Phillip B. Williams 

PEN Award for Poetry in Translation  

• Exhausted on the Cross, written by Najwan Darwish and translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid

• Everything I Don’t Know, written by Jerzy Ficowski and translated from the Polish by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer

• I Name Him Me: Selected Poems of Ma Yan, written by Ma Yan and translated from the Chinese by Stephen Nashef

• Outgoing Vessel, written by Ursula Andkjær Olsen and translated from the Danish by Katrine Øgaard Jensen

• Ova Completa, written by Susana Thénon and translated from Spanish by Rebekah Smith 

PEN Translation Prize 

• FEM, written by Magda Cârneci and translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter

• New Year, written by Juli Zeh and translated from the German by Alta L. Price

• Migratory Birds, written by Mariana Oliver and translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches

• The Last One, written by Fatima Daas and translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud

• Kaya Days, written by Carl de Souza and translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman

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

• A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, by Hanif Abdurraqib 

• Homo Irrealis: Essays, by André Aciman 

• Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time, by Teju Cole 

• These Precious Days: Essays, by Ann Patchett 

• Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South, by Margaret Renkl

PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award 

• The Memory Thief: And the Secrets Behind What We Remember — A Medical Mystery, by Lauren Aguirre 

• The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 

• Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship, by Catherine Raven

• Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World, by Lisa Wells

• Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive, by Carl Zimmer  

PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography  

• The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness, by Katie Booth

• All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler, by Rebecca Donner

• Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World, by Phillip Hoare

• The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky, by Andrew D. Kaufman

• Orwell’s Roses, by Rebecca Solnit 

PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction 

• Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City, by Andrea Elliott 

• All that She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family’s Keepsake, by Tiya Miles 

• Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration, by Reuben Jonathan Miller 

• Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, by Sarah Schulman 

• How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, by Clint Smith 

Related posts 

• Congrats to the 2021 PEN America Literary Award winners! 

• Ugandan novelist is chosen as 2021's International Writer of Courage