PEN Awards Facing Disaster After Many Withdraw in Solidarity With Palestine

The PEN Literary Awards are managing out of authors to honor and struggling with a reliability issue between their friends. In a scathing rebuke of PEN America, 29 authors and translators have withdrawn from thought or outright declined the 2024 awards. On April 17, authors despatched a letter of refusal to PEN’s handling directors, the board liaison, President Jennifer Boyland, and CEO Suzanne Nossel, signed by 21 withdrawing authors and 9 added signatories, who pledged to donate prize revenue in aid of Gaza. They argue that PEN has failed to protect Palestinian writers in Gaza irrespective of the organization’s mission to safeguard independence of expression globally. Of people nominated for the yearly $75,000 Jean Stein E-book Award, nine of 10 withdrew, leaving the most prestigious category with only just one author in opposition. In other places on the lists, which totaled 87 authors, 20 have declined the Robert W. Bingham, Hemingway, Voelcker, and PEN translation awards.

“We cannot, in superior faith, align with an group that has shown this kind of blatant disregard of our collective values,” the letter reads. “We stand in solidarity with a no cost Palestine. We refuse to be honored by an business that acts as a cultural front for American exceptionalism. We refuse to gild the name of an business that runs interference for an administration aiding and abetting genocide with our tax pounds. And we refuse to acquire section in celebrations that will provide to overshadow PEN’s complicity in normalizing genocide.”

The news arrives immediately after months of criticism in excess of the organization’s response to the war in Gaza. On March 14, authors withdrew from the PEN Planet Voices Competition, indicating the nonprofit “betrayed the organization’s professed determination to peace and equality.” In February, 1,300 authors signed an open letter urging PEN to “respond to the amazing threat that Israel’s genocide of Palestinians represents for the lives of writers in Palestine and to independence of expression everywhere you go.”