PEN America unveiled the longlists for their 2020 Literary Awards on Friday, with Olga Tokarczuk , Ocean Vuong ,and Jia Tolentino among the honored authors.
Newly minted Nobel laureate Tokarczuk and translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones made the longlist for the PEN Translation Prize for Drive the Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, as did books by Naja Marie Aidt and Natalia Ginzburg.
Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was one of 10 books longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. Other books on the list included Chanelle Benz’s The Gone Dead and Madeline ffitch’s Stay and Fight.
Tolentino’s buzzy Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion was nominated for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, along with Eve Babitz’s I Used to Be Charming, Lydia Davis’ Essays One, Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophreniasand six other books.
The longlists are notable for featuring an unusually high number of books published by independent presses. The PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection longlist featured titles such as Mimi Lok’s Last of Her Name, published by Kaya Press, and Hadley Moore’s Not Dead Yet and Other Stories, published by Autumn House Press.
The longlist for the PEN/Open Book Award, given to a book in any genre by an author of color, also honored several indie-press books, including Richard Chiem’s novel King of Joy (Soft Skull Press) and Carmen Giménez Smith’s poetry collection Be Recorder (Graywolf Press).
The finalists for the awards will be announced next month, with the winners announced at a ceremony in New York on March 2, 2020.
Michael Schaub is an Austin, Texas–based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
