Out Of The Caribbean: Caribbean authors honoured at 2026 PEN America Literary Awards
Edwidge Danticat, Jamiaca Kincaid and Justin Haynes honoured … The 2026 PEN America Literary Awards ceremony, held on 31 March, marked a significant moment for Caribbean literature, with three writers of Caribbean heritage taking home major prizes at one of American publishing’s most prestigious events. Edwidge Danticat Honoured at PEN America Edwidge Danticat has long […]
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Edwidge Danticat, Jamiaca Kincaid and Justin Haynes honoured …
The 2026 PEN America Literary Awards ceremony, held on 31 March, marked a significant moment for Caribbean literature, with three writers of Caribbean heritage taking home major prizes at one of American publishing’s most prestigious events.
Edwidge Danticat Honoured at PEN America
Edwidge Danticat has long been the writer who carries her native Haiti to the world. This week, that body of work received its latest, and perhaps most prestigious, recognition when the Haitian-American novelist was presented with the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature at the 62nd PEN America Literary Awards ceremony in New York on 31 March.
The $50,000 prize is awarded annually to a living author whose body of work demonstrates enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship. The judges were unequivocal in their praise, describing Danticat’s “border-transcending” writing as work that “has shaped the landscape of fiction and nonfiction alike,” and calling her career “that rare combination of big bangs and steady influence, of power and elegance.”
The presentation itself carried its own symbolism. Jamaican Booker Prize-winning novelist Marlon James presented the award, one Caribbean titan honouring another on one of literature’s biggest stages.
The evening also offered a surprise for Danticat’s readers. The ceremony included a live reading from her forthcoming novel Dèy, performed by Broadway actress Pascale Armand, offering the first public glimpse of new fiction from one of the Caribbean’s most celebrated voices. Moving from Haiti to Brooklyn to Miami, Dèy tells the story of a woman whose sense of self and family is shattered by a random act of violence. Its title is the Creole word for collective mourning, a theme that runs throughout Danticat’s work. The novel is due for publication on 25 August 2026.
Jamaica Kincaid Wins PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award
Antiguan literary giant Jamaica Kincaid won the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Judges described Kincaid as not merely part of the cultural landscape, but the landscape itself; foundational, distinctive, and consistently fearless.
Born in Antigua as Elaine Potter Richardson, Kincaid has spent decades reshaping how the Caribbean experience is rendered in prose, her essays combining precision with emotional depth. Putting Myself Together gathers five decades of that work into a single essential volume.
Justin Haynes Wins PEN Open Book Award
Justin Haynes, whose debut novel Ibis was published by Abrams, won the PEN Open Book Award, which recognises exceptional work by an author of colour.
Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Haynes later moved to Brooklyn and now teaches English and creative writing at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. Judges praised Ibis for its “magical audacity” and multivocal storytelling, tracing the connections between colonialism, slavery, and contemporary human trafficking across a Caribbean island, Venezuela, and the United States.
The novel centres on New Felicity, a coastal village shaped by superstition and the arrival of Milagros, an eleven-year-old Venezuelan refugee searching for her mother.
Haynes’ debut novel is also a finalist for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.
