The stage set for the 2023 PEN America Literary Awards, canceled for 2024 after almost half the nominated finalists withdrew their work from contention over what they perceive as PEN’s stance on the Palestinian crisis. Image: PEN America
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
‘The History They Have Lived’
PEN America has announced that it has cancelled its planned April 29 annual literary awards event—worth close to US$350,000 in winnings—after, as Elizabeth Blair at NPR writes, almost half of the writers and translators nominated withdrew their books from consideration.This takes place as college and university campuses in the United States continue to be confronted with rising levels of pro-Palestinian protests and scrutiny of how they’re handled. For background on this, at the Wall Street Journal, the arrests and other police actions at Columbia University, New York University, Yale University, Harvard, University of Michigan, Emerson, and other schools are reviewed today (April 23) by Alyssa Lukpat, who writes of Columbia’s move to hybrid classes for the remainder of the semester.
As Blair writes it, the PEN Literary Awards honorees who have withdrawn from the competition “contend that PEN America was slow to denounce ‘the incomparable loss of Palestinian life’ and that when the organization finally did, its statement lacked ‘proportional empathy.'”
With Gaza health authorities’ death count standing at more than 34,000 Palestinian lives lost, PEN reports that 28 of 61 nominated authors have pulled their work from contention in the awards, their position captured in a March 13 letter to PEN. In that letter, authors announced their decisions not to participate in the 2024 PEN World Voices festival in New York City.
Some of the commentary in that letter from authors objecting to PEN America’s response to the violence in Gaza read:
“More than 100,000 people have been injured, and more than 30,000 killed, including over 12,000 children. More than 70 percent of the homes in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, leaving more than a million people homeless in a land where nowhere is safe from Israel’s drones, missiles, bombs, and bullets, in part paid for and supplied by the United States government. …
“PEN America has not launched any substantial coordinated support or issued any reports highlighting the scale and scope of the attacks on writers in Gaza, or on Palestinian speech and culture more broadly.
“PEN America has done very little to mobilize or inspire its many members—quite unlike recent PEN America campaigns opposing the war in Ukraine and its impact on culture, or PEN International’s ‘Day of the Dead’ honoring journalists killed in Latin America.”
In addition, the objecting authors in March pointed to what they asserted is “PEN America’s history of condemning authors who choose to honor the Palestinian call for a cultural and academic boycott of Israeli institutions complicit in their oppression, accusing them of impeding ‘the free flow of ideas.'”
The PEN America Literary Awards
In PEN’s announcement on Monday (April 22) of the cancellation of the awards event, the organization’s literary programming lead Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf writes, “We greatly respect that writers have followed their consciences, whether they chose to remain as nominees in their respective categories or not.
“We regret that this unprecedented situation has taken away the spotlight from the extraordinary work selected by esteemed, insightful and hard-working judges across all categories. As an organization dedicated to freedom of expression and writers, our commitment to recognizing and honoring outstanding authors and the literary community is steadfast.”
As Coral Murphy Marcos writes at The Guardian, Jennifer Finney Boylan, PEN America’s current president, has announced that the agency is forming a committee to review PEN’s work “not just over the last six months, but indeed, going back a decade, to ensure we are aligned with our mission and make recommendations about how we respond to future conflicts.”
Marcos at The Guardian points out that PEN “has responded by citing that it has condemned the loss of life in Gaza, called for a ceasefire and helped set up a $100,000 emergency fund for Palestinian writers.” What’s more, no one in coverage that Publishing Perspectives has examined around this story has minimized in any way the unspeakable brutality of the October 7 assault by Hamas on Israel or the appalling rise of anti-Semitism observed in many world markets since that attack.
The clear irony, however, is that PEN America, like its international sister chapters of PEN International, is an organization the perceived principles of which reflect a balanced concern and even-handed response to all victims of violence and aggression. And yet, the complaint issued in the March letter by authors read, “If organizations like PEN America cling to the illusion of political neutrality in the face of a clear effort to destroy Palestinian lives and culture, one can only wonder whether there will be any writers left in Gaza to tell the story of their apocalypse, or to trust words and speech, when the killing finally ends. Or any record left of the history they have lived.”
If anything, the incident with PEN America—and the question now for its administration about how it goes forward—illustrate the volatility of the political environment in which even the most respected of humanitarian entities are operating, whether book-and publishing-related like PEN or not.
PEN/Stein Award Purse: The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund
The US$75,000 purse for the unawarded 2024 Jean Stein Book Award, by order of the Stein estate, is being donated to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. Image: PEN America
The Pen America Literary Awards are not only lucrative but also big: The program this year featured six of its major underwriter-named awards. You can see on this page the finalists for these six categories of award this year.
In the case of the first listed category, the 2024 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award—for a work of any genre that “has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting influence”—nine of the 10 nominated authors withdrew their work from consideration. “The Estate of Jean Stein,” PEN reports, “has directed PEN America to donate the $75,000 award to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund,” noting that Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Wendy Vanden Heuvel, and Bill Clegg on behalf of the estate have stipulated that Stein was “a passionate advocate for Palestinian rights who published, supported, and celebrated Palestinian writers and visual artists.”
In two categories the winner of which still was in contention, PEN has announced these winners:
- The winner of the 2024 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel is Javier Fuentes for Countries of Origin (Pantheon).
- The winner of the 2024/PEN Award for Poetry in Translation is Patty Crane for her translation from Swedish of The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer (Copper Canyon Press) by Tomas Transtromer.
In addition, it has announced these 2024 career-achievement award winners:
- Tony Kushner for the 2024 PEN/Mike Nichols Writing for Performance Award
- Suzanne Jill Levine for the 2024 PEN/Ralph Manheim Award for Translation
- Playwright and screenwriter Guadalís Del Carmen for the 2024 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award
- A posthumous award has been given to novelist, critic, and playwright Maryse Condé for the 2024 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature; Condé died on April 2
The organization adds, “For the cash prizes that could not be conferred, a decision about how to allocate the funds will be made on a case-by-case basis, according to the specifications of each award contract and the wishes of our generous award underwriters.”
The PEN America Literary Awards have operated since 1963 with as many as 20 distinct categories across fiction, poetry, children’s literature, and drama.
More from Publishing Perspectives on book and publishing awards in the international industry is here, more on the PEN America Literary Awards is here, more on PEN America is here, and more on politics and world publishing is here.