Mahreen Sohail’s Small Scale Sinners (A Public Space) has been selected as the winner of the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
“With sharp and striking prose, Small Scale Sinners performs the magical feat of encompassing every aspect of humanity in a slim volume of stories, which reveals the hearty landscape of desire, rage, love, and loss contained in nearly every life,” said PEN/Faulkner Awards Committee chair Lauren Francis-Sharma. “As we look forward to celebrating the five finalists at our May ceremony, we are immensely grateful to our panel of judges for their commitment to the task of selecting this year’s winner.”
This year’s judges—Samantha Hunt, Tania James, and De’Shawn Charles Winslow—considered 387 novels and short story collections by American authors published in the US during the 2025 calendar year. Submissions came from 155 publishing houses, including independent and academic presses.
“In Small Scale Sinners, the magnitude of the small is roundly confirmed,” said Hunt, James, and Winslow. “This brief volume reveals the vast universes within the realm of the domestic. Sentences collect the infinite, and single lives contain multitudes. Sohail’s small scale presents our largest subjects: family, love, humor, and horror. We celebrate these beautiful stories. Their complexity and compassion challenge ideas of power by proclaiming the humane wisdom of fiction.”
Mahreen Sohail was born in Islamabad, Pakistan. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied as a Fulbright Scholar, and was a Writing Fellow at A Public Space and a Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Kenyon Review, Pushcart Prize XLII, and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, DC.
“I wrote the stories in Small Scale Sinners over the course of a decade,” said Sohail. “With the book I was trying to map out possible ways of being an independent woman in the world. I am moved to see this book slowly find its readers, very grateful that it resonated with the judges of the PEN/Faulkner Award, and immensely honored to see it share space with such excellent writing.”
The PEN/Faulkner Award is America’s most prestigious peer-juried literary prize. As the author of the winning book, Sohail will receive $15,000. The authors of each of the other finalists— Addie E. Citchens, for Dominion; Quiara Alegría Hudes, for The White Hot; Jonas Hassen Khemiri, for The Sisters; and Lily King, for Heart the Lover—will receive $5,000. Recent winners include Small Rain by Garth Greenwell; What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez; The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li; The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine; The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw; Sea Monsters by Chloe Aridjis; Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi; and Improvement by Joan Silber.
All five books and their authors will be honored at the annual PEN/Faulkner Award Celebration on Wednesday, May 6, at 6 pm ET at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in DC. This event will feature presentations by our judges; original readings by our five finalists; and an appearance by our 2026 PEN/Faulkner Literary Champion, Willee Lewis, along with other special guests, including book critic Ron Charles. Ticket information is available at www.penfaulkner.org.
ABOUT OUR 2026 JUDGES
Samantha Hunt is the author of five books, including The Seas, The Unwritten Book, and The Dark Dark. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. Her writing has been translated into thirteen languages. Hunt won a Bard Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She teaches at Pratt Institute.
Tania James is the author of four works of fiction, most recently Loot (Knopf), which was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award and the Carol Shields Prize. Her short stories have appeared in Freeman’s; Granta; The New Yorker; O, The Oprah Magazine; and One Story, among other places. A 2025 Guggenheim fellow in fiction, she lives in Washington DC.
De’Shawn Charles Winslow is the author of Decent People and In West Mills, which was a Center for Fiction First Novel Prize winner, an American Book Award recipient, and a Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction winner, as well as a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Award, Lambda Literary Award, and Publishing Triangle Award. He was born and raised in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He currently lives in New Jersey.
ABOUT THE PEN/FAULKNER FOUNDATION
The PEN/Faulkner Foundation champions the breadth and power of fiction in America. We achieve that mission by administering the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Bernard and Ann Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel to help call the world’s attention toward literary achievements, as well as by naming an annual PEN/Faulkner Literary Champion; by bringing free books and authors into under-resourced DC schools to inspire the next generation of readers and writers; and by curating public literary programs to amplify the work of accomplished authors.