Stalin's Daughter by Canadian author Rosemary Sullivan is a finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, which comes with a purse of $5,000.

Sullivan won the 2015 Hilary Weston Prize and is shortlisted for the 2016 RBC Taylor Prize for her biography of Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Sullivan's competition in the Pen Literary Award biography category include Adam Sisman's John le Carré: The Biography, Deborah Lutz's The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, Nancy Princenthal's Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art and Peter Slevin's Michelle Obama: A Life.

The PEN Literary Award's biggest prize is the debut fiction category, worth $25,000. This year's shortlist includes Mia Alvar's In the Country: Stories, Angela Flournoy's The Turner House, Julie Ironmuanya's Mr. and Mrs. Doctor, Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer: A Novel and Jennifer Tseng's Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness.

Vancouver-born Brin-Jonathan Butler made the shortlist for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing for his memoir on exploring Cuba's worldclass boxing system, entitled The Domino Diaries: My Decade Boxing With Olympic Champions and Chasing Hemingway's Ghost in the Last Days of Castro's Cuba.

Butler will go up against the likes of former Toronto Blue Jays catcher Bengie Molina, who wrote a book about his father with writer Joan Ryan called Molina: The Story of the Father Who Raised an Unlikely Baseball Dynasty. The PEN's sports literary prize comes with a $5,000 award.

Ta-Nehisi Coates' bestselling book of essays Between the World and Me is in the running for the $10,000 PEN/Diamonstein-Spelvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. American literary giant Marilynne Robinson is also a finalist in the category for her book The Givenness of Things: Essays.

The Pen awards for sports writing, biography and translation prizes will be announced on March 1. The remaining winners for debut fiction, essay, literary science, PEN Open Book and Pen/Fusion Prize will be announced on April 11.

To find the shortlists for all categories, follow this link.