PEN America announced on August 14th the winners of the 2013 Pen America Literary Awards. Sergio De La Pava won the PEN/Robert Bingham Prize of $25,000 for a debut work for his novel A Naked Singularity. The $10,000 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction went to Katherine Boo, winner of last year’s National Book Award in nonfiction, for Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass won the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay with his essay collection What Light Can Do. Other award recipients included Rowan Ricardo Phillips for his first collection of poems (PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award), Tom Reiss for his biography The Black Count (PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award), and Kevin Young, for his book of literary and cultural criticism, The Grey Album, and Gina Apostol, for her novel, Gun Dealer’s Daughter, each received the PEN Open Book Award for a book-length literary work by an author of color.

The PEN America Literary Awards is the most comprehensive literary awards program in the country. Spanning over the last fifty years, the Awards serve to highlight exceptional individuals in literature across diverse fields ranging from fiction to sports writing. In 2013, PEN will confer sixteen distinct awards, fellowships, grants, and prizes totaling almost $150,000 to writers, translators, and editors. This year’s winners and runners up will be honored in a ceremony on October 21st at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Proshansky Auditorium. Andy Borowitz is to serve as the Master of Ceremonies.

Earlier this year, Benjamin Alire Sáenz picked up the PEN/Faulkner Award for his short fiction collection, Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club.

The full list of prizes, winners, runner-ups, and judges can be found on the PEN America webpage: http://www.pen.org.