PEN/Hemingway Award 1985: Complete list of winners

The PEN/Hemingway Award has long served as a celebrated marker of literary promise, honoring debut novelists who demonstrate the kind of precise, economical prose that Ernest Hemingway himself championed. In 1985, the award found its recipient in Josephine Humphreys’s Dreams of Sleep, a novel that showcased exactly the sort of controlled narrative voice and emotional depth the prize seeks to recognize. Humphreys’s debut announced her arrival as a significant literary talent, earning her a place among the growing roster of writers the PEN/Hemingway Award has championed since its inception.

What makes Humphreys’s win particularly noteworthy is the novel’s portrait of contemporary American life—intimate, psychologically acute, and rendered with a restraint that feels almost classical in its execution. Dreams of Sleep captures the interior lives of its characters with remarkable subtlety, the kind of nuanced characterization that distinguishes debut novels destined to endure. The PEN/Hemingway Award’s track record of spotting such talent makes this recognition both a validation of Humphreys’s craft and a signal to readers that her work deserves serious attention.

Below, you’ll find the complete list of the 1985 PEN/Hemingway Award winner and details about this significant moment in contemporary American letters.

Debut Novel

• Dreams of Sleep by Josephine Humphreys