FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 1, 2022
Media Contact:
Matt Porter
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2022 PEN/Hemingway Award Celebration
BOSTON – The 2022 winner and finalists for the 2022 PEN/Hemingway Award for Best Debut Novel will be honored by Ernest Hemingway’s grandson in a virtual celebration hosted by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
Debut author Torrey Peters will be honored for her debut novel Detransition, Baby. Seán Hemingway, the grandson of Ernest Hemingway, will honor Peters on Sunday, April 10, in a virtual celebration hosted by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, the world’s major repository of Ernest Hemingway’s personal papers. The winner will receive a cash prize underwritten by the Hemingway Foundation.
Torrey Peters will receive $10,000 and a month-long Residency Fellowship at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, a retreat for artists and writers, valued at $12,000. This year’s judges—authors Zeyn Joukhadar, Téa Obreht, and Daniel Torday—praised the book, adding its sharp wit, devastating clarity, and keenly observed characters, is exceptional not only for its fluid, intelligent prose, but also for the way the novel challenges dominant narratives of time and of gender that flatten and erase the rich complexity of the lives of both cis and trans people. There’s an elation, an honesty, and a verve to Peters’s voice that sounds unlike any prose in recent memory, a unique energy which keeps the narrative moving as she threads in and out of the consciousness of her unforgettable characters. Detransition, Baby is a masterful portrait of an unlikely family navigating a world that so often forecloses trans futures, three characters struggling to learn to love each other with grace, tenderness, and, when all else fails, with humor.
“I am thrilled we could honor Torrey Peters this year,” said Hemingway Foundation President Carl Eby. “The PEN/Hemingway Award exists precisely to promote this kind of talent and help bring it to the public eye. I’m delighted to see Peters join the illustrious ranks of past recipients of this award.”
Following recognition of the honorees, award-winning author and environmentalist Terry Tempest Williams will deliver the keynote address.
Torrey Peters spends her time in Brooklyn, New York and Vermont. Detransition, Baby was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Award, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Masters in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth.
Peters joins the ranks of notable PEN/Hemingway honorees, most recently Kawai Strong Washburn, Ruchika Tomar, Tommy Orange, Marilynne Robinson, Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, Colson Whitehead, Jennifer Haigh, ZZ Packer, George Saunders, Ha Jin, Junot Díaz, and Yiyun Li—a four-decade lineage of literary excellence founded in 1976 by Mary Hemingway, the widow of Ernest Hemingway, to honor her late husband and draw attention to first books of fiction.
The 2022 PEN/Hemingway Award finalists are Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Overlook Press), Dear Miss Metropolitan: A Novel by Carolyn Ferrell (Henry Holt and Company), The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Novel by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Harper) and The Five Wounds: A Novel by Kirstin Valdez Quade (W.W. Norton and Company).
All finalists for the prize will receive a Residency Fellowship at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming.
The virtual PEN/Hemingway Award Celebration will take place on Sunday, April 10, from 2:00 p.m. to 3:15 p.m. EDT and is free and open to the public. Those interested in watching the event can register for the event online. The ceremony is completely virtual this year.
The PEN/Hemingway Award Celebration is supported by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the Hemingway Family, and the Friends of the Ernest Hemingway Collection.
The Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library spans Hemingway’s entire career and contains ninety percent of Hemingway’s known papers, making the Kennedy Library the world’s principal center for research on the life and work of Ernest Hemingway. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis described Mary Hemingway’s gift of Ernest Hemingway’s papers to the Kennedy Library as helping “to fulfill our hopes that the Library will become a center for the study of American civilization, in all its aspects.”
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The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is one of 15 presidential libraries administered by the National Archives and Records Administration and supported, in part, by the Kennedy Library Foundation, a non-profit organization.
The John F. Kennedy Library Foundation is the non-profit partner and creative collaborator of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, which is administered by the United States National Archives and Records Administration. Over the past forty years, this partnership has produced world class exhibits, the largest, most advanced digital archive created by a presidential library, award-winning educational and digital resources, and public programs that make the Library the largest convener of public dialogues in the Boston area. Grounded in the archival evidence, these activities promote a greater appreciation of America’s political and cultural heritage, help people understand the major challenges facing democracy today, and inspire new generations to engage with the issues at the heart of contemporary life that relate to the legacy of President John F. Kennedy.
The Hemingway Foundation was established in 1965 by Mary Hemingway, Ernest’s widow, “for the purposes of awakening, sustaining an interest in, promoting, fostering, stimulating, supporting, improving, and developing literature and all forms of literary composition and expression.” The Foundation is proud to promote Hemingway scholarship and new voices in contemporary fiction.
PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect open expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible. pen.org
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