PEN Center USA, the West Coast branch of PEN International, announced the finalists for its 27^th Annual Literary Awards. The winners will be named in September, and honored at the 2017 Literary Awards Festival in Los Angeles on October 27. The event will be hosted by actor Nick Offerman. PEN Center USA will also award it’s 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award to Margaret Atwood during the ceremony.

The finalists are:

Fiction:
Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs (Viking)
Lydia Millet, Sweet Lamb of Heaven (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Bonnie Nadzam, Lions (Grove Atlantic)
Martin Pousson, Black Sheep Boy (Rare Bird)

Creative Nonfiction: 
Brian Blanchfield, Proxies (Nightboat)
Lily Hoang, A Bestiary (Cleveland State University Poetry Center)
Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air (Random House)
Kao Kalia Yang, The Song Poet (Metropolitan)

Research Nonfiction: 
Timothy Egan, The Immortal Irishman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Edward Humes, Door to Door (Harper)
Mason Inman, The Oracle of Oil (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Elizabeth Letts, The Perfect Horse (Ballantine)

Poetry: 
Ari Banias, Anybody: Poems (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Solmaz Sharif, Look (Graywolf)
Sun Yung Shin, Unbearable Splendor (Coffee House Press)
Safiya Sinclair, Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press)

Young Adult:
Calla Devlin, Tell Me Something Real (Simon & Schuster/Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
Stacey Lee, Outrun the Moon (GP Putnam's Sons, Penguin Books for Young Readers)
Neal Shusterman, Scythe (Simon & Schuster/Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)
John Smelcer, Stealing Indians (Leapfrog Press)

Translation:
Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Confessions by Rabee Jaber (New Directions)
Philip Boehm, The Fox Was Ever the Hunter by Herta Müller (Metropolitan)
Geoffrey Brock, Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Jordan Stump, Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga (Archipelago)

Journalism:
Shane Bauer, “My Four Months as A Prison Guard” (Mother Jones)
Pamela Colloff, “The Reckoning” (Texas Monthly)
Christopher Goffard, “Framed” (Los Angeles Times)
Eli Saslow, “The White Flight of Derek Black” (The Washington Post)

Drama:
Boni Alvarez, Bloodletting (Playwrights’ Arena)
Michelle Carter, Rose in America (AlterTheater)
Lisa Loomer, Roe (Oregon Shakespeare Festival)
Will Snider, How to Use a Knife (Capital Stage Company)