World Literary Awards

← Back to PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction ぺん/ふぉーくなーしょう(ふぃくしょんぶもん)

Edition 45 (2025)

FictionNovelAmerican Literature Award

Winners

5 people

A narrator is hospitalized in the ICU during COVID-19 and is forced to confront illness and the dysfunction of American healthcare.

At the edge of illness, the shapes of the body, care, and love come into focus.

270 pages
illnesshealthcarevulnerability

A reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's perspective, centering race, literacy, and agency.

Jim's voice turns a canonical American novel inside out.

320 pages
slaveryliteracy and educationagencyreinterpretation of history
Danzy Senna Nominee

A biracial novelist leaves literary fiction for television writing in a sharp satire of publishing and racial fixation.

Between writing and earning, her sense of self begins to slip.

305 pages
media and artracial imaginationcareer and self-realization
Pemi Aguda Nominee

A short-story collection that brings motherhood, identity, and the supernatural into tense collision.

From beneath the ordinary, ghostlike memories begin to sprout.

167 pages
motherhoodhauntingsidentity

An episodic novel about three Palestinian immigrant families in Baltimore, exploring generational conflict, class, and belonging.

Within the fractures of family life, a community takes shape.

212 pages
immigrationintergenerational conflictrace and class