Judges have selected the five finalists for the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, America’s most prestigious peer-juried literary prize. The finalists are Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda (W.W. Norton & Company), Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj (Harpervia), James by Percival Everett (Doubleday), Small Rain by Garth Greenwell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and Colored Television by Danzy Senna (Riverhead).
“This year’s finalists offer us breathtaking voices from Palestinians in Baltimore, from Lagos, from a vivid Los Angeles and a hospital bed in Iowa City, as well as from the deep annals of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” said PEN/Faulkner Awards Committee chair Lauren Francis-Sharma. “These voices haunt, whisper, and invoke humor and terror. They make us feel deeply at a time when so many of us feel numb at the happenings of the world around us. In these pages we get the fullness of humanity, and we here at PEN/Faulkner cannot wait to celebrate these magnificent contributions to American fiction.”
This year’s judges—Bruce Holsinger, Deesha Philyaw, and Luis Alberto Urrea—considered 414 eligible novels and short story collections by American authors published in the US during the 2024 calendar year. Submissions came from 166 publishing houses, including independent and academic presses.
Holsinger, Philyaw, and Urrea prepared the following statement: “These five books moved us with their compassion, their imagination, their quiet artistry. They view our world from oblique and unsettling angles while giving us new ways to comprehend the often unimaginable: illness, displacement, enslavement, exile. Yet they also burst with humor and light, with characters who gleam and sing from the page. Enthralling and often transcendent, these books give us hope for the prospects of fiction-making in an uncertain future and fill us with gratitude for the resiliency of art.”
The “first among equals” winner, who will receive $15,000, will be announced in early April. The remaining four finalists will each receive an honorarium of $5,000. All five authors—along with this year’s PEN/Faulkner Literary Champion, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden—will be honored on May 15 at the 45th Anniversary PEN/Faulkner Award Celebration, to be held at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
’Pemi Aguda is an MFA graduate from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her writing has been published in Granta, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, and other publications, and it has been awarded the O. Henry Prize for short fiction. She is from Lagos, Nigeria, and is currently living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Susan Muaddi Darraj is the author of American Book Award–winner A Curious Land and was a finalist for a Palestine Book Award. A United States Artists’ Ford Fellow and past winner of the Maryland State Arts Council’s Independent Artist Award, she is also the author of Farah Rocks, the first children’s book series to feature a Palestinian American character. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and teaches at Harford Community College and Johns Hopkins University.
Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier. He has received the NBCC Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award and The Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, was released in 2023 and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by more than fifty publications in nine countries, and it is being translated into a dozen languages. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. He lives in Iowa City.
Danzy Senna is the bestselling author of six previous books, including Caucasia, New People, and most recently Colored Television. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, she teaches writing at the University of Southern California.