Some of the winners of the 2017 PEN America awards have been announced and, to our delight, they include Helen Oyeyemi, Angela Ajayi and Grace Oluseyi.
Helen Oyeyemi’s collection of stories, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, won the $5,000 PEN Open Book Award, given “for an exceptional book-length work of literature by an author of color published in 2016.”
We covered Aaron Bady’s review of it here.
Angela Ajayi and Grace Oluseyi were among the winners of the $2,000-each PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, awarded “to recognize 12 emerging fiction writers for their debut short story published in 2016.” Angela Ajayi’s story, “Galina,” published in Fifth Wednesday Journal, is an immersive study of the sense of loss in a daughter’s relationship with her mother. Grace Oluseyi’s “A Modern Marriage,” out in Boston Review, is a neat stitch of a girl’s relationship with, and eventual marriage to, her academic superior in the US who she later discovers is already married in Nigeria.
A few of the awards, including the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award given “to recognize a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact” for which Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things is shortlisted, will be announced on March 27.
We congratulate Helen Oyeyemi, Angela Ajayi and Grace Oluseyi!
Read Grace Oluseyi’s “A Modern Marriage” in Boston Review.
See the full list of winners here.
**************
Post image by Ubud Writers & Readers Festival via Flickr
Kthanxbye March 14, 2017 13:46
Grace Oluseyi's story in the Boston Review was the best story I've read in a loooong time. The woman can write. Ahn-ahn. Can't wait to read more from her.