2011 PEN Literary Awards

In 2011, PEN is awarding 17 prizes to writers at work in a variety of genres. From fiction to nonfiction, from drama to poetry, this year’s line-up of awards and honorees is perhaps our richest and most expansive to date, with three prizes that are brand new: one for up-and-coming writers, one for a book on the physical or biological sciences, and the other for a lifetime of achievement in literary sports writing. Below are excerpts from this year’s honorees. See the full list of winners, runners-up, and judges.

Stiltsville
by Susanna Daniel

In her expression, I recognized a cautious optimism I’d felt many times. “I know he’s not interested right now,” she said. “But I don’t see why he couldn’t get interested.” [More]

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
by Danielle Evans

“You smell like food,” Jasmine said. “I don’t know why you wanna smell like food. Ain’t nobody here gonna lick you because you smell like bananas. Maybe that shit works in Bronxville, but not with us.” [More]

Kapitoil
by Teddy Wayne

Jessica left to talk with Rebecca and her friends, and she returned to our circle and asked, “Anyone for weed?” [More]

Serious Men
by Manu Joseph

Ayyan Mani’s thick black hair was combed sideways and parted by a careless broken line, like the borders the British used to draw between two hostile neighbours. [More]

Hocus Bogus
by Romain Gary (writing as Émile Ajar)
translated by David Bellos

There is no beginning. I was begotten—just like you—and since then I’ve been lumbered. I tried to get out of it every way I could. [More]

Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights
translated by Malcom C. Lyons with Ursula Lyons

The reciters of such tales were concerned not with life but livelihood, for their audiences had to he encouraged to return, night after night. [More]

Separatists
by Smith Henderson

The wheels slipped on the wet dirt road heading into Billie Gulch and slipped again up the steep drive to the Short house. The drive itself was pitted like shell range. [More]

Fallout
by Elliot Holt

She drew ominous red circles in our Rand-McNally to mark the circumference of destruction. At the kitchen table, the hanging lamp created a tunnel of light under which she envisioned doom. [More]

Emperor of All Maladies
by Siddhartha Mukherjee

That this seemingly simple mechanism—cell growth without barriers—can lie at the heart of this grotesque and multifaceted illness is a testament to the unfathomable power of cell growth. [More]

Texas Tough
by Robert Perkinson

If we are to fully understand the causes and consequences of America’s prison buildup, a good place to start is Huntsville, Texas. [More]

The Warmth of Other Suns
by Isabel Wilkerson

There was no explaining to little James and Velma the stuffed bags and chaos and all that was at stake or why they had to put on their shoes and not cry and bring undue attention from anyone who might happen to see them leaving. [More]

Cultures of War
by John Dower

In the original version, the message began as follows: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in world history …” What a difference a second draft can make. [More]

Essays from the Nick of Time
by Mark Slouka

When he was eight years old, my father was visited by a night­mare so powerful that half a century later the mere retelling of it would stipple his skin with gooseflesh and lift the hair on the back of his arms. [More]

The Possessed
by Elif Batuman

I often ask myself a similar question: How does someone with no real academic aspirations end up spending seven years in suburban California studying the form of the Russian novel? [More]

Listen to This
by Alex Ross

I hate “classical music”: not the thing but the name. It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be created today. [More]

Cleopatra: A Life
by Stacy Schiff

She has gone on to become an asteroid, a video game, a cliché, a cigarette, a slot machine, a strip club, a synonym for Elizabeth Taylor. Shakespeare attested to Cleopatra’s infinite variety. He had no idea. [More]

A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster
by Wendy Moffat

Here at the north end of Santa Monica it was still possible to believe in the wildness and innocence of California. [More]

Secret Spring: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward
by Justin Spring

These were the three adults who populated Steward’s childhood—stern, comfortless, deeply religious women who could not quite understand him or his ways. [More]

Journal of an Ordinary Grief
by Mahmoud Darwish
translated by Ibrahim Muhawi

When the storm dispersed them, the present was shouting at the past: “It’s your fault.” And the past was transforming its crime into a law. As for the future, it was a neutral observer. [More]

The Answer to the Riddle Is Me
by David Stuart MacLean

When my parents walked into my room at the asylum, some motor in my brain spun and sparked a blue arc of electricity between two exiled neurons in my brain. They were my parents; they looked like shit. [More]

Heroes and Consequences
by Chester Phillips

Had the threats of prison and my sister’s suicide been removed, would I have killed or come close to killing? Was it fear alone that stopped me? I cannot say for sure, but I do not think so. [More]

Aleksandar Hemon is the recipient of the 2011 PEN/W.G. Sebald Award for a Fiction Writer in Mid-Career.

The Noble Truths of Suffering

Not even a postcard did he ever send us; once he was gone from our lives, he was gone for good. For a while, every time we talked on the phone Father asked me if I had spoken with my friend Macalister, and I never had, whereupon Father would suggest it would be good for me to stay friends with him. Invariably, I had to explain that we had never been and never would be friends. “Americans are cold,” Mother diagnosed the predicament. [More]

David Henry Hwang is the recipient of the 2011 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a Master American Dramatist.

Yellow Face

That’s how much I wanted to come here. Even when I didn’t know anything more about America than I saw in Shanghai at the movies—even then, I knew my real life wasn’t the one I was living in China. Second son of a cheapskate father, who didn’t even know how to talk to his children. I knew that was a fake life, and my real life was here. [More]

M. Butterfly

They say in opera the voice is everything. That’s probably why I’d never before enjoyed opera. Here … here was a Butterfly with little or no voice—but she had the grace, the delicacy … I believed this girl. I believed her suffering. I wanted to take her in my arms—so delicate, even I could protect her, take her home, pamper her until she smiled. [More]

Marcus Gardley is the recipient of the 2011 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for an American Playwright in Mid-Career.

The Road Weeps, The Well Runs Dry

Life is hard nough with a rooster’s cock-doodle wakin me every morn and sometimes sky thunder wakin me in the dead of night but havin to endure your empty talk, you comin here actin like we friends but needin somethin makes me want to beat ya. Knock ya down. Makes me want to stand on your head like a cliff to get a better view of the ocean. [More]

Dance of the Holy Ghosts

Nope. Choked on a pork chuck and went out like the disco era: hella quick. I should know I was there. Was sometime last year in the mess hall when he croaked. One minute he was finger lickin, suckin the shit out of a neck bone. Next minute neck bone was suckin the life out of him. I call it irony. [More]

Two Poems
by Ishion Hutchinson

Immodest in broad daylight,
a ruddy-bellied woman bathes
at the public stand-pipe,
jubilant with water laughter
as we all stand and wait
with our buckets and bottles.
No one dares advance
an “Excuse me, miss.” [More]

Adonis: Selected Poems
translated by Khaled Mattawa

I remember madness 
leaning for the first time
on the mind’s pillow.
I was talking to my body then
and my body was an idea
I wrote in red. [More]

Canti
by Giacomo Leopardi
tanslated by Jonathan Galassi

You, hills and shores,
the splendor past that turned
the veil of night to silver in the west,
will not stay orphaned long,
for in the opposite
direction soon you’ll see
the sky turn white again and dawn arise [More]

Angina Days: Selected Poems by Günter Eich
translated by Michael Hofmann

Angina days, blue Kent,
time so yellow that none
can tell it, a black index finger
protrudes from a blue glove
and points you the way home
along the red wall. [More]

Oranges and Snow: Selected Poems of Milan Djordjević
translated by Charles Simic

Inside your gaping sleeves
I’ll let the threadbare little animals
that are my arms crawl!
So it may begin to breathe
and open its eyes, shudder,
then move one sleeve,
spread its wings, fly, caw
and drape me with its darkness.
I, who am its blood and guts. [More]

Two Girls Staring at the Ceiling
by Lucy Frank

Everything
you thought
you knew
you don’t.

Because you’ve stepped
off the edge
of your life
into sickland. [More]

Up Jump the Boogie
by John Murillo

The dead miss out on summer. The sun
Bouncing off moving trains and a woman

To love you when you get inside. Somewhere
In this city, a man will plead for love gone,

Another chance, and think himself miserable. [More]

Three Poems
by Adam Day

The pliers are for pulling ears
from two white-rasped
skull-craters. We shake the body
hard by the arms—penis
and more pop out—teeth fill
the mouth gap, and finally, the green
leakage of ordure falls from that button
of twisted flesh. [More]

Four Poems
by Brett Fletcher Lauer

The rainy season is a league away traveling
at the speed of an era. The cloud formation
does not dissolve as I remove my eyes

from my palms. I can no longer walk the
     distance. [More]