The free expression group PEN America has canceled its 2024 literary awards ceremony following months of escalating protests over the group’s response to the warfare in Gaza, which has been criticized as overly sympathetic to Israel and led almost half of the prize nominees to withdraw.
The occasion was set to happen on April 29 at City Corridor in Manhattan. However in a information launch on Monday, the group introduced that though the prizes would nonetheless be conferred, the ceremony wouldn’t happen.
“We significantly respect that writers have adopted their consciences, whether or not they selected to stay as nominees of their respective classes or not,” the group’s chief officer for literary programming, Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, stated within the launch.
“We remorse that this unprecedented state of affairs has taken away the highlight from the extraordinary work chosen by esteemed, insightful and hard-working judges throughout all classes. As a corporation devoted to freedom of expression and writers, our dedication to recognizing and honoring excellent authors and the literary neighborhood is steadfast.”
In current months, PEN America has confronted intensifying public criticism of its response to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led assaults on Israel, which killed roughly 1,200 folks, in line with Israeli authorities, and Israel’s army response in Gaza, which has left about 34,000 folks useless, in line with well being officers there.
In a collection of open letters, writers have demanded that PEN America help an instantaneous cease-fire, as its international dad or mum group, PEN Worldwide, and different nationwide chapters have achieved.
In March, a bunch of outstanding writers, together with Naomi Klein, Lorrie Moore, Michelle Alexander and Hisham Matar, introduced that they had been pulling out of subsequent month’s World Voices Competition, one in all PEN America’s signature occasions. And over the previous a number of weeks, rising numbers of nominees for the literary awards, together with Camonghne Felix, Christina Sharpe and Esther Allen, introduced that they had been withdrawing their books from consideration.
In a letter that PEN America management obtained final week, 30 of the 87 nominated writers and translators (together with 9 of the ten nominees for one prize) criticized the group’s “disgraceful inaction” on the state of affairs in Gaza, accusing it of “clinging to a disingenuous facade of neutrality whereas parroting” what the letter characterised as Israeli authorities propaganda. The letter additionally known as for the resignation of the group’s longtime chief government, Suzanne Nossel, and its president, the novelist Jennifer Finney Boylan, together with that of the group’s government committee.
“PEN America states that ‘the core’ of its mission is to ‘help the appropriate to disagree,’” the nominees acknowledged. “However amongst writers of conscience, there isn’t a disagreement. There may be reality and fiction. The actual fact is that Israel is main a genocide of the Palestinian folks.”
That letter drew a quick however forceful response final week through which the group described the warfare in Gaza as “horrific” however challenged what it stated was the letter’s “alarming language and characterizations.”
“The attitude that ‘there isn’t a disagreement’ and that there are amongst us last arbiters of ‘reality and fiction’ reads to us as a requirement to foreclose dialogue within the identify of mental conformity, and one at odds with the PEN Constitution and what we stand for as a corporation,” the group stated in a press release.
The awards ceremony just isn’t as excessive profile as PEN’s star-studded annual gala on the American Museum of Pure Historical past, set for Could 16. However the cancellation of the awards occasion additionally raises questions on whether or not the group will go forward with the World Voices Competition, set to happen in New York from Could 8 to 11, with extra occasions in Los Angeles the next week.
Final month, some panelists, together with individuals on a panel about challenges to free expression for Palestinians, introduced they had been pulling out. Since then, extra writers have withdrawn, a few of them quietly.
On Monday, Nossel, who has led PEN America since 2013, stated the pageant, which at the moment contains greater than 80 individuals at dozens of occasions, would go ahead.
“We now have been clear, we’re open to dialogue and dialog,” Nossel stated. “That’s our lifeblood as a corporation.”
“In our minds,” she added, “it’s how you progress ahead.”
The fallout from the Oct. 7 assault has riven many cultural and literary organizations (together with 92NY and Artforum), which have confronted robust criticism and generally inner upheaval for his or her response. PEN America, which has greater than 4,500 members, has typically weighed in with statements urging organizations to not cancel occasions or audio system, and calling for maximal area for expression of criticism and debate.
In responses to its personal critics, PEN has typically referred to its “huge tent” method, and the fact that membership contains folks with all kinds of opinions on the present Gaza warfare and the broader topic of Israel and the Palestinians. Nevertheless it has additionally moved nearer to the place of a few of its critics. On March 20, in a press release following the withdrawals from the World Voices Competition, it known as for “an instantaneous cease-fire and launch of hostages.”
This month, a letter signed by Salman Rushdie, Ayad Akhtar, Jennifer Egan and 6 different former PEN presidents urged writers and PEN members to “preserve religion” in the neighborhood PEN has constructed, nonetheless fractious.
“The pageant was conceived amid battle to attract collectively numerous authors and thinkers at a time of deepening and lethal geopolitical stress after 9/11,” the letter stated. “Within the ensuing a long time as vitriolic and violence has surged, the visionary function behind the pageant has solely grown extra pressing.”
In a separate assertion final week, Boylan, the group’s president, introduced that PEN America can be endeavor a broad evaluate of all of its work over the previous decade “to make sure we’re aligned with our mission and make suggestions about how we reply to future conflicts.”
Boylan, who took over as PEN president final yr, stated she had heard from “many, many authors who don’t agree with these withdrawing from PEN occasions, and who don’t want to withdraw from our occasions themselves, however are afraid of the results in the event that they communicate up.”
In an e-mail on Monday, Boylan stated that whereas the cancellation of the awards was painful, “I deeply respect all of those writers for his or her ardour and their advocacy.”
PEN America stated in its assertion on Monday that winners who had not withdrawn would nonetheless obtain their prize cash. It additionally stated that the property of Jean Stein, a author and philanthropist who died in 2017, had directed that the $75,000 money award for the prize named in her honor be despatched to the Palestine Kids’s Aid Fund.
The group additionally stated it might nonetheless honor the lifetime achievement winners, together with the playwright Tony Kushner and the novelist Maryse Condé. Kushner, a longtime critic of Israeli coverage towards Palestinians, has in current months spoken up in protection of artists who’ve criticized Israel and the warfare in Gaza.
