We are thrilled to announce the longlist of books for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, America’s most prestigious peer-juried literary prize. The longlist includes the following ten titles:

Covers of the ten books selected for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award longlist

“In this time of trouble, literature remains one of our best tools for making sense of things,” said PEN/Faulkner Awards Committee Chair, Louis Bayard. “The ten titles chosen by our judges are an important reminder of why we keep reading.”

In selecting the longlist, this year’s judges—Eugenia Kim, Rebecca Makkai, and Rion Amilcar Scott—considered more than 500 eligible novels and short story collections by American authors published in the US during the 2021 calendar year. Submissions came from more than 200 publishing houses, including small and academic presses. From this longlist, the judges will select five finalists for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Those finalists will be announced in early March. The winning book—the “first among equals,” selected from among the five finalists—will be announced in April.

ABOUT OUR 2022 JUDGES

Eugenia Kim’s debut novel, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, won the 2009 Borders Original Voices Award, was shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was a Washington Post Best Historical Novel and Critic’s Pick. Her second novel, The Kinship of Secrets, was a nominee for the New American Voices Award, was a Library Reads best book of November and Hall of Fame list for 2018, and an Amazon Best Book of the Month/Literature and Fiction. Several of her short fictions and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies. She is a two-time Washington DC, Council on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship recipient and received fellowships at Yaddo, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction and nonfiction at Fairfield University’s MFA Creative Writing Program.

Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize, among other honors. Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

Rion Amilcar Scott is the author of the story collection The World Doesn’t Require You (Norton/Liveright, August 2019), a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and winner of the 2020 Towson Prize for Literature. His debut story collection, Insurrections (University Press of Kentucky, 2016), was awarded the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His work has been published in places such as New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, Best Small Fictions 2020, and The Rumpus, among others. His story “Shape-ups at Delilah’s” was published in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020. He was raised in Silver Spring, Maryland and earned an MFA from George Mason University, where he won the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, a Completion Fellowship, and an Alumni Exemplar Award. He has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writing Conference, Kimbilio, and the Colgate Writing Conference, as well as a 2019 Maryland Individual Artist Award. Presently he teaches Creative Writing at the University of Maryland.

Save the Date

We hope you will join PEN/Faulkner for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award Celebration, happening virtually on May 2, 2022 at 8 pm ET

You can purchase the books on this year’s longlist here.