Skip content
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting
2023 Pen America Literary Award Winners
All playlists

2023 Pen America Literary Award Winners

Since 1963, the PEN America Literary Awards Program has honored outstanding voices in fiction, poetry, science writing, essays, biography, children’s literature, translation, drama, and more. Here are the 2023 winners, juried by panels of esteemed, award-winning writers, editors, booksellers, and critics.

Dr. No

A Novel

By: Percival Everett
Narrated by: Amir Abdullah
Length: 6 hours 22 minutes

A sly, madcap novel about supervillains and nothing, really, from an American novelist whose star keeps rising

The protagonist of Percival Everett's puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means "nothing" in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for "nothing.") He is an expert on nothing. That... Read more

Audiobook details   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

The Black Period

On Personhood, Race, and Origin

By: Hafizah Augustus Geter
Narrated by: Hafizah Augustus Geter
Length: 10 hours 45 minutes

An acclaimed poet reclaims her origin story as the queer daughter of a Muslim Nigerian immigrant and a Black American visual artist in this groundbreaking memoir, combining lyrical prose, biting criticism, and haunting visuals.

“Hafizah Augustus Geter is a genuine artist, not bound by genre or form. Her only loyalty is the harrowing beauty of the... Read more

Audiobook details   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

Night of the Living Rez

By: Morgan Talty
Narrated by: Darrell Dennis
Length: 7 hours 6 minutes

“The twelve stories intersect creating more of a novel than a set of separate stories. I love the characters--Paige, Frick, Fellis, grandmother, mom, Tyson, and JP, all of them doing the best they can under the circumstances. I think what I love most is that the stories are told without judgment or snark but with compassion and understanding.... Read more

Audiobook details   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting

Calling for a Blanket Dance

By: Oscar Hokeah
Narrated by: Oscar Hokeah & Rainy Fields
Length: 6 hours 49 minutes

“This is an incredible family epic in sleek, unpretentious form. Hokeah uses his characters as crisp prisms through which we see the nature of family: vicious and precious, mournful and joyful, everything in-between. A remarkable debut! Read more

Audiobook details   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness

By: Robin Coste Lewis
Narrated by: Robin Coste Lewis
Length: 1 hour 23 minutes

A genre-bending exploration of poetry and human migration—another revelatory expedition from the National Book Award–winning poet who changed the way we see art, the museum, and the Black female figure. • Winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry

Twenty-five years ago, after her maternal grandmother’s death, Robin Coste Lewis discovered a... Read more

Audiobook details   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

People from Bloomington

By: Budi Darma
Narrated by: Nathan Agin, Mark Bramhall, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Langston Darby, Sunil Malhotra, Reynaldo Piniella, Eric Sharp, Emiko Susilo & Tiffany Tsao
Length: 7 hours 28 minutes

Winner of the 2023 PEN Translation Prize

Winner of the 2023 NSW Premier’s Translation Prize

An eerie, alienating, yet comic and profoundly sympathetic short story collection about Americans in America by one of Indonesia’s most prominent writers, now in an English translation for its fortieth anniversary, with a foreword by Intan Paramaditha

A...
Read more

Audiobook details   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

Heartbreak

A Personal and Scientific Journey

By: Florence Williams
Narrated by: Florence Williams
Length: 10 hours 37 minutes

For fans of Wild and Lab Girl, Heartbreak is a uniquely immersive audiobook, merging science and self-discovery to change the way we think about loneliness, health, and what it means to fall in and out of love. When her twenty-five-year marriage unexpectedly falls apart, journalist Florence Williams expects the loss to hurt. What she doesn’t... Read more

Audiobook details   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

Dilla Time

The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm

By: Dan Charnas
Narrated by: Dan Charnas
Length: 14 hours 52 minutes

This program contains examples of J Dilla's music performed in the studio by drummer Nate Smith and is accompanied by a bonus PDF of maps, photos, guides, and more.

"This book is a must for everyone interested in illuminating the idea of unexplainable genius.” —QUESTLOVE

Equal parts biography, musicology, and cultural history, Dilla Time...
Read more

Audiobook details   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

The Inheritors

An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning

By: Eve Fairbanks
Narrated by: Janina Edwards
Length: 12 hours 4 minutes

Winner of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction

This “elegant” and “unfailingly empathetic” narrative (The New York Times) follows three ordinary South Africans living through the most extraordinary reckoning with race and power any modern country has ever faced.

Dipuo, who grew up in apartheid-era Johannesburg’s largest Black... Read more

Audiobook details   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

A Left-Handed Woman

Essays

By: Judith Thurman
Narrated by: Kim Niemi
Length: 17 hours 10 minutes

WINNER OF THE 2023 PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY



A collection of essays from Judith Thurman, the National Book Award–winning biographer and New Yorker staff writer.



Judith Thurman, a prolific staff writer at The New Yorker for more than two decades, has gathered a selection of her essays and profiles in A Left-Handed... Read more

Audiobook details   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting