PEN America has revealed the finalists for its 2025 literary awards, given annually by the nonprofit group to “outstanding voices in translation, fiction, poetry, science writing, essay, sports writing, biography, children’s literature, and drama.”
The group named three finalists for its $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, given to “a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact”: Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn; With My Back to the World: Poems by Victoria Chang; and On Freedom by Timothy Snyder.
Shortlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography were Max Boot for Reagan: His Life and Legend; Cynthia Carr for Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar; Keith O’Brien for Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball; Lyndsey Stonebridge for We Are Free To Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience; and Karen Valby for The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History.
The finalists for the PEN Open Book Award, which honors “an exceptional book-length work of any literary genre by an author of color,” were Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women’s Fury in Lawless Times by Kali Nicole Gross; The Dark Delight of Being Strange: Black Stories of Freedom by James B. Haile III; Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism by Jenn M. Jackson; and The Blueprint by Rae Giana Rashad.
Making the shortlist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel were Blackburn for Dead in Long Beach, California; Michael Deagler for Early Sobrieties; Karol Lagodzki for Controlled Conversations; Samuel Kọ́láwọlé for The Road to the Salt Sea; and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio for Catalina.
The winners of this year’s prizes will be announced at a ceremony in New York on May 8. A full list of finalists is available at the PEN America website.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
