Alert! Teju Cole has made the shortlist for the PEN Open Book Award with his novel Every Day is for the Thief.
PEN America confers a number of prizes annually in a number of categories, awarding a total of $150 000 to writers, editors and translators of excellent literature. The Open Book Award is given to “an exceptional book-length work of literature by an author of color published in 2014″.
In an article for Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon wrote about the strength of the shortlist for the award.
Read the article:
The last of these, awarded as the PEN Open Book Award, is by many lengths the strongest shortlist of the bunch. Finalists include Rabih Alameddine for An Unnecessary Woman, Teju Cole for Every Day Is for the Thief, Roxane Gay for An Untamed State, Claudia Rankine for Citizen: An American Lyric, and Samrat Upadhyay for The City Son.
The five authors on the shortlist were selected from a longlist of 11 by judges R. Erica Doyle, W. Ralph Eubanks and Chinelo Okparanta. Rabih Alameddine, who came to South Africa last year for the Open Book Festival in Cape Town, has also been shortlisted for this award for An Unnecessary Woman.
Read more about the prize, longlist, and judges and see all the shortlists for the 2015 PEN Literary Awards on PEN America’s website:
The PEN Open Book Award was created by PEN American Center’s Open Book Committee, a group committed to racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities. The award confers a $5,000 prize upon an author of color.
Book details
- Every Day is for the Thief by Teju Cole
EAN: 9780571307920
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- Every Day is for the Thief by Teju Cole
EAN: 9780812995787
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- An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine
EAN: 9780802122940
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Image courtesy of Internaz