PEN/Hemingway Award 1977: Complete list of winners

The PEN/Hemingway Award, which honors exceptional debut fiction and continues Ernest Hemingway’s legacy of recognizing powerful new voices, marked its early years in 1977 with a truly distinctive choice. That year’s debut novel winner was Renata Adler’s Speedboat, a work that would prove as unconventional as it was acclaimed. Adler’s fragmented, elliptical narrative style—told through a series of loosely connected vignettes and observations—challenged conventional storytelling just as Hemingway himself had revolutionized American prose decades earlier. The novel’s sharp intelligence and formal experimentation made it a bold statement from an author proving herself a major literary talent.

What made Adler’s win particularly significant was the way Speedboat demonstrated that the PEN/Hemingway Award could recognize literary ambition beyond traditional narrative structures. The novel captures the anxieties and contradictions of 1970s New York with a distinctive voice that eschews conventional plot in favor of accumulated moments of wit, insight, and social observation. Adler’s sparse yet luminous prose style connected her work to Hemingway’s own aesthetic principles—economy, precision, and the power of what remains unsaid—even as her modernist sensibility pushed in entirely new directions.

Below, you’ll find the complete details of this year’s PEN/Hemingway Award winner and the broader context of what made 1977 a memorable year for American debut fiction.

Debut Novel

• Speedboat by Renata Adler