Overview
- The free-speech group staged its 62nd awards at Town Hall in New York City, where host Murray Hill presided Tuesday over nearly $350,000 in prizes.
- Cannupa Hanska Luger won the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Surviva: A Future Ancestral Field Guide, marking the return of a top prize that was withheld last year.
- Peter Beinart earned the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, Jamaica Kincaid won the essay prize, and Nicholas Boggs took the biography award.
- Career honors went to novelist Edwidge Danticat with the PEN/Nabokov Award and to playwright Julia Cho with the PEN/Laura Pels theater award.
- The ceremony marked a reset after a Gaza-related boycott lifted in December 2025, which had led to cancellations in 2024, and it was the first under co-CEOs Summer Lopez and Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf; Beinart noted many Palestinian writers lacked the chances he had.