2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Finalist ’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 has been awarded the O. Henry...
2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction FinalistSusan 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...
2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction FinalistPercival 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...
2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction WinnerGarth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, Cleanness, and Small Rain. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, among other journals, and his nonfiction has appeared widely, including...
2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction FinalistDanzy 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...
2024 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction WinnerClaire Jiménez is a Puerto Rican writer who grew up in Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York. She is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories (Johns Hopkins Press, 2019) and What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez...
2024 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction FinalistJamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man, which won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the John Leonard Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. His work...
2024 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction FinalistHenry Hoke is an editor at The Offing and a writer whose work has appeared in No Tokens, Triangle House, Electric Literature, and the flash noir anthology Tiny Crimes. He co-created the performance series Enter>text in...
2024 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction FinalistAlice McDermott is the author of nine novels, all published by FSG, including Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award, and That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This, which were finalists for the Pulitzer...
2024 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction FinalistCOLIN WINNETTE’s books include Coyote, Haints Stay, and The Job of the Wasp, which was an American Booksellers Association’s Indie Next Pick. Winnette’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Playboy,...
2023 PEN/Faulkner Award WinnerYiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction—Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in...
2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction FinalistJonathan Escoffery is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review,...
2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction FinalistLaura Warrell is a contributor to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and is a graduate of the creative writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in HuffPost,...
2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction FinalistDionne Irving is originally from Toronto, Ontario. She is the author of THE ISLANDS (Catapult) and QUINT (7.13 Books) She currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program and the Initiative on Race and Resilience at the...
2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction FinalistKathryn Harlan received an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she now teaches writing. She was the recipient of the 2019 August Derleth Graduate Creative Writing Prize. Her work has appeared in the...
Finalist for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for FictionRabih Alameddine is the author of the novels An Unnecessary Woman; I, the Divine; Koolaid; The Hakawati; and the story collection The Perv. In 2019, he won the Dos Passos Prize. Purchase The Wrong End of the...
Finalist for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for FictionNawaaz Ahmed was born in Tamil Nadu, India. Before turning to writing, he was a computer scientist, researching search algorithms for Yahoo. He holds an MFA from University of Michigan–Ann Arbor and is the winner of...
Finalist for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for FictionCarolina de Robertis is the author of five novels, including Cantoras, winner of both a Stonewall Book Award and a Reading Women Award, and a finalist for both the Kirkus Prize and a Lambda Literary Award; it was...
Finalist for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for FictionCarolyn Ferrell is the author of the short-story collection Don’t Erase Me, which received the Art Seidenbaum Award of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize program, the John C. Zacharis Award given by Ploughshares, and...
Finalist for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for FictionImbolo Mbue is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. The novel has been translated into eleven...
Louise Erdrich
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw
Scattered Lights by Steve Wiegenstein
Mother Daughter Widow Wife by Robin Wasserman
The Knockout Queen by Rufi Thorpe
Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear by Matthew Salesses
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
The Night Swimmers by Peter Rock
Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li
Sea Monsters by Chloe Aridjis
Don’t Skip Out on Me by Willy Vlautin
Love War Stories by Ivelisse Rodriguez
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Tomb of the Unknown Racist by Blanche McCrary Boyd
2018 Joan Silber, Improvement FINALISTS: Hernán Diaz, In The Distance Samantha Hunt, The Dark Dark Achy Obejas, The Tower of the Antilles Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing 2017 Imbolo Mbue, Behold the Dreamers FINALISTS: Viet Dinh, After Disasters Louise Erdrich,...
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