PEN Awards 2021: Barbara Ehrenreich, Ross Gay, Victoria Chang among winners of coveted literary prize

New York: Barbara Ehrenreich, Ross Gay and Michael X Wang are among the winners of prizes from PEN America, the literary and human rights organization.

During a virtual ceremony 8 April night, Gay’s Be Holding: A Poem received the $75,000 Jean Stein Award for a book-length work which has “broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form.” Ehrenreich’s Had I Known won the $15,000 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for essays by a “seasoned writer” and Wang’s Further News of Defeat was given the $25,000 PEN/Robert W Bingham Prize for the best first book of short stories.

[caption id=“attachment_9514291” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Other winners included Victoria Chang for her work, Obit and Kawai Strong Washburn for Sharks in the Time of Saviours.[/caption]

Also on 8 April, Kawai Strong Washburn’s Sharks in the Time of Saviors won the $10,000 PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel, Asako Serizawa’s Inheritors won the $10,000 PEN Open Book Award for an outstanding work by a writer of color and Victoria Chang’s Obit received the $5,000 PEN/Voelcker Award for poetry.

Awards for career achievement, previously announced, were presented to Anne Carson, Kwame Dawes, Daniel Alexander Jones, Pierre Joris and George C Wolfe.