In an auditorium at the New School in New York on Monday night one of the quieter events of the literary season took place: the PEN awards. Given by the American branch of the international free speech advocacy organisation, the PEN awards recognise writers in virtually every field: translation, playwriting, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. There are awards for lifetime achievement, and awards for debut writers who “show promise”.
Most of the award winners had been previously announced, so many of the poets, translators and playwrights who stepped up to the podium were well prepared for their honors. But there were three categories whose honorees were kept secret until last night.
The first of these, the PEN Open Book Award for a work of literature published by a writer of color in 2014, went to Claudia Rankine for her much-laureled lyric essay Citizen: An American Lyric. The book addresses the micro-aggressions (moments of unintended discrimination) that African Americans often face. “I feel that in writing begins responsibilities,” she said. “I also hope that in reading begins responsibilities.”
The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay went, meanwhile, to Ian Buruma for his Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War. Most of the essays in the book had been previously published in the New York Review of Books. Buruma, clearly shocked at having won, dedicated most of his speech to thanking his editor at the NYRB, Robert Silvers.
Meanwhile, the PEN/Robert W Bingham Prize for debut fiction went to Jack Livings’s The Dog, a short story collection set in China.
The number of awards demands an efficient ceremony, with most of the recipients limiting their thanks to a sentence or two. Many honorees did not have a literary background. The recipient of the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing, Bob Ryan, a former columnist for the Boston Globe, pointed that out, saying: “This is the first time in my career I can attach the word ‘literary’ to my résumé.”
The PEN awards lived up to their reputation for honoring books which had perhaps gone under-recognized in other, more prominent ceremonies. As one of the other recipients, Sheri Fink, put it in her remarks, the awards “change careers … They help these people find readers.”
A full list of recipients is available on PEN’s website.
