Inside the “Oscars for Books,” the PEN America Literary Awards

Fittingly, Ringwald would present the two translation awards of the evening. I asked her thoughts on the difference between literary culture in America and in other countries. In France, she said, “the writers are much more like rock stars.” 

“I feel like people revere the whole TV-and-movies thing more than books here sometimes,” Dratch said. Is she a big reader?

“I used to read all the time, and I don’t know what happened,” she said. 

“Phones, that’s what happened,” Ringwald replied.

“Phones, and my dwindling attention span,” Dratch said. “But I don’t want to contribute to the demise of literature.” 

Throughout the awards program, presenters and honorees including Robert Jones Jr., Hafizah Augustus Geter, Erika Dickerson-Despenza, and Percival Everett (who received the night’s top honor, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award) discussed the literary traditions that informed their work, along with the impact they’ve seen.  

In her acceptance speech, Fey—who has presented at the Oscars of Oscars—said “as a 52-year-old woman who’s been living in New York and writing comedy for 30 years, there aren’t too many rooms anymore where I feel like a charlatan and a failure, but we found one! It’s tonight!” 

PEN America president Ayad Akhtar appeared onstage with a reminder that free speech is not absolute. “For the past 100 years, we’ve worked to defend the rights of writers to imagine, and speak, and create freely,” Akhtar said. “As we look ahead to the next hundred years, our mission is fueled by new urgency. Alarming attempts to use the power of the state to ban ideas, and the books that contain them, have proliferated in this country, and we are also battling a dwindling space of civil exchange—and a growing belief on all sides of the political spectrum, that the potential harms of speech hold an equal or even greater claim on us than the freedom to speak.”

Rosaz Shariyf, who organized the event, believes “there’s no other show like this, bringing together such a vast cross section of the writing and publishing worlds and honoring writers as the stars they are,” she said. The night was “full of glamour and laughter, balanced with a deep reverence for the form and its ability to ask and elucidate some of our society’s biggest, most urgent questions—and to connect us to one another as it does.”