PEN/Hemingway Award 2010s: A decade of winners

The PEN/Hemingway Award has long celebrated literary excellence in debut fiction, and the 2010s proved to be a particularly vital decade for the prize—one that showcased an increasingly diverse and internationally minded American literature. The award seemed to hit its stride during these years, recognizing not just technically accomplished first novels but debuts that fundamentally expanded what literary fiction could address and accomplish. Writers like Teju Cole with Open City and Kevin Powers with The Yellow Birds brought philosophical depth and unflinching examinations of urban life and war’s aftermath, while later winners like NoViolet Bulawayo (We Need New Names) and Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing) introduced voices that traced histories of displacement, immigration, and diaspora with startling grace. By the end of the decade, Tommy Orange’s There There arrived as something of a culmination—a formally inventive debut that captured contemporary Native American experience with urgency and stylistic innovation that felt undeniably of its moment.

What made this particular stretch of the PEN Hemingway Award winners so compelling was how the prize seemed to reflect and even anticipate larger shifts in American literary culture. These debut novelists weren’t simply echoing their predecessors; they were establishing entirely new registers for how fiction could speak. Ottessa Moshfegh’s provocative Eileen and Weike Wang’s sharp Chemistry demonstrated the award’s willingness to champion subtlety and formal experiment alongside more overtly ambitious narratives. The decade’s winners, taken together, read less like a parade of individual achievements and more like a conversation about identity, belonging, and the shape of contemporary consciousness—a conversation that only a decade as literarily fertile as the 2010s could have sustained.

Below, explore the full list of PEN/Hemingway Award winners from 2010 to 2019 and discover how each debut helped define a generation of American letters.