Elizabeth McCracken has been selected as the winner of the 2026 PEN/Bernard and Ann Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Given since 1988, the award recognizes writers who have demonstrated exceptional achievement in the short story form.
“Elizabeth McCracken’s short stories are meticulously crafted with such intelligence and heart,” said Malamud Committee Chair Jung Yun. “She embraces her characters and grants them the dignity of fully imagined interior lives, rich with humor and irony, heartbreak and grief. With each collection, McCracken’s stories renew the form’s old promise that a few thousand words can hold a whole life. Reading her is a welcome reminder of why people fell in love with short fiction in the first place.”
Elizabeth McCracken is the author of nine books of fiction and non-fiction. Her short stories have appeared multiple times in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. Her most recent collection of short stories, The Souvenir Museum, was longlisted for the National Book Award. Thunderstruck and Other Stories was also longlisted for the National Book Award and won the 2015 Story Prize. She lives in Bath, Somerset.
“Short stories—writing them, reading them—have been a way for me to understand every angle of my life and the lives of others: microscope, telescope, periscope,” said McCracken. “They have given me so much over decades that it feels impossible to summarize what the PEN/Malamud means to me. Everything, really. It’s a prize that has been given to so many of my most important influences and my most beloved writers, and named after one of our greatest. I won’t say I’m humbled, because in my private moments I’m insufferably happy to be in such company, and also incredibly grateful and astonished.”
Last year’s winner was David Means. Recent winners include Ted Chiang, Edwidge Danticat, Yiyun Li, Charles Baxter, Lydia Davis, John Edgar Wideman, Amina Gautier, Joan Silber, and Jhumpa Lahiri. A complete list of past winners is also available.
About the art of the short story, Bernard Malamud once said, “I like packing a self or two into a few pages, predicting lifetimes. The drama is terse, happens faster, and is often outlandish. A short story is a way of indicating the complexity of life in a few pages, producing the surprise and effect of a profound knowledge in a short time.”
McCracken will be honored at the annual PEN/Malamud Award Ceremony, held in partnership with American University, on October 4, 2026. Ticket information for the ceremony, which will be open to the public, will be available this fall.