2016 PEN Literary Awards Shortlists

The PEN Literary Awards is the most comprehensive awards program in the country, offering over $100,000 each year to fiction writers, poets, translators, children’s authors, biographers, nonfiction writers, and playwrights. Each prize is conferred by a panel of PEN members who bring to the task a familiarity with the solitary task of creating great literature.

Here are some of the titles that have been nominated for this prestigious award. The full list can be found on the PEN Literary Awards website.

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness by Jennifer Tseng
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Rain: a natural and cultural history by Cynthia Barnett
The Boy Who Played with Fusion: extreme science, extreme parenting, and how to make a star by Tom Clynes
Not a Game: the incredible rise and unthinkable fall of Allen Iverson by Kent Babb
The Domino Diaries: my decade boxing with Olympic champions and chasing Hemingway’s ghost in the last days of Castro’s Cuba by Brin-Jonathan Butler
The Secret Game: a wartime story of courage, change and basketball’s lost triumph by Scott Ellsworth
Molina: the story of the father who raised an unlikely baseball dynasty by Bengie Molina with Joan Ryan