PEN America cancels 2024 Literary Awards ceremony
In the US, PEN America has cancelled its 2024 Literary Awards ceremony, which was to be held on 29 April, reports Publishers Weekly.
It comes after 28 authors withdrew books from consideration for the awards, including 9 of the 10 authors nominated for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, citing the organisation’s response to the war in Gaza. This mass withdrawal of books from consideration followed mounting concern about freedom of expression at PEN America regarding its response to this humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The US$75,000 (A$116,000) prize accompanying this year’s PEN/Stein award will instead be donated to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund at the direction of the Literary Estate of Jean Stein.
The five finalists and winning titles for each of the more than 20 literary awards other than the PEN/Stein award had already been selected by judges before the mass withdrawals. The two winners who remained under consideration for their awards will receive their cash prizes: Javier Fuentes won the US$10,000 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel for Countries of Origin (Pantheon), and the late Tomas Tranströmer won the US$3,000 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for The Blue House: Collected works of Tomas Tranströmer (trans by Patty Crane, Copper Canyon Press).
No winners will be announced if the winning title was withdrawn from consideration for the award, PEN America added. The organisation said that decisions on how to allocate the funds from cash prizes that cannot be awarded ‘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’.
‘We greatly respect that writers have followed their consciences, whether they chose to remain as nominees in their respective categories or not,’ PEN America literary programming chief officer Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf said. ‘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.’
In a statement last week, PEN America board president Jennifer Finney Boylan announced a ‘review’ of PEN’s work ‘going back a decade’.
Category: International news
