The PEN America Literary Awards Are Canceled. The Writers Know Why.
“I know that no amount of prestige or prize money is worth the lifelong shame of knowing you were on the wrong side of a genocide.”
Authors are staging their own protest amid an extraordinary week of action against Israel’s occupation of Gaza. In solidarity with a free Palestine, a group of 29 writers and translators sent a letter of refusal to the executive board and trustees of PEN America on April 17, withdrawing from the free-speech organization’s annual Literary Awards, resulting in a cancellation of the ceremony entirely. “We cannot, in good faith, align with an organization that has shown such blatant disregard of our collective values,” the letter reads. “We stand in solidarity with a free Palestine. We refuse to be honored by an organization that acts as a cultural front for American exceptionalism. We refuse to gild the reputation of an organization that runs interference for an administration aiding and abetting genocide with our tax dollars. And we refuse to take part in celebrations that will serve to overshadow PEN’s complicity in normalizing genocide.”
Authors are claiming PEN America has a bias in showing implicit support for Zionism and normalizes genocide with its ambivalent actions and tepid statements since October, including the organization’s initial hesitancy to call for a cease-fire. (In contrast, PEN chapters abroad swiftly called for an end to the siege.) On April 22, after a series of ill-received responses, PEN America canceled the Literary Awards ceremony, saying it respects that writers “followed their consciences” but “regret” that the controversy has distracted from honoring them. The $75,000 prize accompanying the Jean Stein Book Award, the event’s most prestigious and lucrative honor, will be donated to Palestine Children’s Relief Fund at the direction of the Literary Estate of Jean Stein, not PEN America.
Camonghne Felix, whose memoir Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation was nominated for the Jean Stein Award, declined to accept it on April 8 due to “PEN’s ongoing betrayal.” Including Felix, nine of ten nominees turned down the award.
“I am unendingly grateful to the panel of judges who selected my work for the Jean Stein Award — their acknowledgment means everything to me,” Felix said over email on April 17. “However, my belief that PEN America should be held accountable for its betrayals to my community must supersede the fact of my gratitude. When I decided to decline my award, I did so from a place of absolute clarity: our power as writers can and should be leveraged towards challenging institutions that hold cultural monopolies within our community but fail to protect the voices and livelihoods of those of us most at risk.”
“Nothing about this is easy,” writer Joseph Earl Thomas said upon hearing the news of the cancellation in an email. His memoir Sink was longlisted for the Jean Stein Award before he refused consideration.
“My hope is that we will see many forms of continual solidarity with Palestine, not all of which will be obvious or public, or by famous folks or writers, and that rather than produce shame or discouragement amongst those of us who cannot say anything or voice discontent in ways we accept as righteous, this will push those with much more power than any of us individually to start revising the collective choices that have led us to the atrocities of the present, exemplified by the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” he said in a statement.
The blistering April 17 letter of refusal condemns PEN’s response to the crisis in Gaza, claiming the organization showed “a lack of proportional empathy” and “often laced ahistorical, Zionist propaganda hidden under the guise of neutrality.” “The current war in Gaza is horrific,” reads an April 18 statement from PEN America. “But we cannot agree that the answer to its wrenching dilemmas and consequences lies in less discourse, less honoring of writers, and less shining a light on the critical contributions of writers.”
The drama engulfing PEN is just the latest domino to fall after a series of controversial moves protested by authors who have addressed both internal and external criticisms of PEN America. On January 18, two acclaimed novelists withdrew from a PEN event citing the organization’s decision to platform Mayim Bialik, an outspoken Zionist and actor, at a talk with Moshe Kasher. PEN moved forward with Bialik’s event on January 31, where viral footage showed a protester, Palestinian American writer Randa Jarrar, being forcibly removed from the venue, clinging to a chair, for playing a recording of 13 names of writers and poets killed by Israel in Gaza since October 2023.
Immediately following Jarrar’s protest, more than 1,300 writers began signing an open letter demanding “PEN America release an official statement about the 225 poets, playwrights, journalists, scholars and novelists killed in Gaza and name their murderer: Israel, a Zionist colonial state funded by the U.S. government.” The next domino fell at an event on March 13, when star writers including Naomi Klein, Michelle Alexander, Hisham Matar, Isabella Hammad, Maaza Mengiste, Zaina Arafat, and Susan Muaddi Darraj withdrew from the World Voices Festival over the organization’s failure to join in calls for “an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.” (As of writing, that event is still scheduled to take place in New York and Los Angeles May 8–16.) Five months into the war, PEN America finally called for a cease-fire on March 20, setting up a $100,000 emergency fund for Palestinian writers.
“PEN America refuses to name the genocide, as many PEN organizations around the world have done including PEN International,” Ordinary Notes author Christina Sharpe, another Jean Stein nominee, said of her refusal in a statement.
Sharpe points to South Africa’s charging Israel with genocide before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January as a model for how the organization could have taken action. “This work of writing that I do is in defense of life, it is in defense of existence, it is a refusal of the politics that make entire populations disposable,” she added.
As much as I’d like to win a big award, I know that no amount of prestige or prize money is worth the lifelong shame of knowing you were on the wrong side of a genocide.
Last week’s letter of refusal demands the organization contend with both the killings in Gaza and its own systemic issues. “PEN America’s leadership has eroded our confidence in its mission, and the important work they claim to support; instead, they cling to a disingenuous façade of neutrality, while simultaneously parroting hasbara talking points,” the letter reads. The staff union at PEN America alleges their employer proposed guidelines for members engaging in political activity that would “chill free expression,” the union wrote in a statement last month. When the PEN Awards cancellation was announced, staffers felt they couldn’t publicly sign their names to their statement in support of the protesting writers, realizing “how ironic that is for employees of a free expression organization,” per Lit Hub. (Simultaneously, PEN has faced other eyebrow-raising press. On March 17, writer Alex Tretbar accused the organization of failing to pay out the prize money he won for the PEN America Prison Writing contest in 2022. PEN eventually paid him his $250 prize plus an additional sum, promising to fully compensate other unpaid Prison Writing Contest winners.)
The writers are also calling for action against leadership. Signatories demand the immediate resignation of PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel, PEN America president Jennifer Finney Boylan, and the entire PEN America Executive Committee. They also seek an external review of PEN’s alleged “longstanding support for Israeli occupation,” an apology to Jarrar for the suppression of her action, and for the organization to participate in good-faith bargaining with the PAU and to ensure their free speech is protected. Nossel and Finney Boylan drew criticism for visiting Israel in December 2023 for a PEN Israel conversation while avoiding Gaza just miles away. In a State Department memo in 2011, Nossel said the top priority for the U.S. as a new Human Rights Council member was the “defense of Israel.” She was the executive director of PEN America in 2015 when the organization honored French satirists Charlie Hebdo, the publication known for drawing Islamophobic cartoons. That year, six PEN members boycotted the PEN America Gala.
“In my opinion, an organization that advocates for human rights cannot waver on calling for an end to bloodshed,” Alejandro Varela, a Jean Stein nominee for his short-story collection The People Who Report More Stress, said in a statement. “Life first; debate later.”
Finney Boylan responded to the letter of refusal on April 18, vowing to review PEN’s work going back a decade in an acknowledgment of the gap between the organization’s values and the dissenting literary communities. But Finney Boylan’s response was remarkable for its tone-deafness — at a time when writers are voicing strong criticisms about the organization, she chose to open her own statement with a bizarre list of collective nouns for groups of animals to describe what she’s calling a “schism of writers.” She argues that conversation, not “silencing,” is the only way forward.
Maya Binyam, the author of the acclaimed novel Hangman and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, was troubled by PEN’s characterization of the nominee withdrawals as reported by Lit Hub on April 17. “It saddens me that PEN’s leadership has described these withdrawals as ‘a demand to foreclose dialogue in the name of intellectual conformity’ — as if the Israeli genocide of Palestinians were a fiction worthy of debate, and not a reality around which PEN has an obligation to marshall its resources,” she said in a statement. Binyam refused two prizes for Hangman: the Jean Stein Award and the $10,000 Hemingway Award for Debut Novel.
“As soon as I saw that other authors were withdrawing from the contest, there was no doubt in my mind that I should join them,” James Frankie Thomas, who was also nominated for the Hemingway Award for his debut novel, Idlewild, said of withdrawing after he learned of what he claims are PEN’s “Zionist affiliations.”
“As much as I’d like to win a big award, I know that no amount of prestige or prize money is worth the lifelong shame of knowing you were on the wrong side of a genocide. I’ve felt so helpless watching the genocide unfold, especially as an American whose tax dollars are funding the bombs,” he said. “How could I possibly pass up an opportunity to join an organized protest? How could I live with myself if I chose to prioritize my own career instead? It wasn’t an easy decision, but it was a simple one. I hope PEN America makes the same decision.” With the ceremony canceled, it’s clear PEN heard the calls. How it answers them remains to be seen.
Related