We are thrilled to announce the longlist of books for the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction:
- Ghostroots by ’Pemi Aguda (W. W. Norton & Company)
- Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj (Harpervia)
- The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich (Harper)
- James by Percival Everett (Doubleday)
- Small Rain by Garth Greenwell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Scribner)
- There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes Jr. (Mariner)
- Colored Television by Danzy Senna (Riverhead)
- The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck (Viking)
- Devil Is Fine by John Vercher (Celadon)
“This year’s list teems with the personal and the historic, offering us humor, tenderness, and hardship, all while confronting readers with a clarity that is reflective of the exciting breadth of American fiction,” said PEN/Faulkner Awards Committee Chair Lauren Francis-Sharma.
In selecting the longlist, this year’s judges—Bruce Holsinger, Deesha Philyaw, and Luis Alberto Urrea—considered 414 eligible novels and short story collections by American authors published in the US during the 2024 calendar year. Submissions came from 166 publishing houses, including small and academic presses. From this longlist, the judges will select five finalists for the 2025 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. The authors of the five finalist books will be honored at the PEN/Faulkner Award Celebration, which will be held at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library on May 15.
ABOUT OUR 2025 JUDGES
Bruce Holsinger is a novelist, literary scholar, and editor of New Literary History. He has written or edited eleven books, including four novels, most recently The Displacements and The Gifted School, which won the Colorado Book Award. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the New York Review of Books, and many other publications. He chairs the board of WriterHouse, a nonprofit in Charlottesville, Virginia that serves the local literary community. Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia, he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Deesha Philyaw is the author of the debut short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, which won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow. Her debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, is forthcoming from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2026.
Luis Alberto Urrea, a Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist, is the author of 19 books, winning numerous awards for his poetry, fiction, and essays. His latest novel, Good Night Irene, was an instant New York Times bestseller and is based on his mother’s service as a Red Cross “Donut Dolly” serving troops on the frontlines of the European theater in WWII. The Devil’s Highway, Urrea’s 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. His novel The House of Broken Angels was a 2018 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction award for his collection of short stories, The Water Museum, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Urrea’s novel Into the Beautiful North is a Big Read selection of the National Endowment of the Arts. He is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
ABOUT THE PEN/FAULKNER FOUNDATION
The PEN/Faulkner Foundation champions the breadth and power of fiction in America. We are dedicated to the idea that fiction creates empathy within and among communities and advances civil discourse. American culture thrives when stories from diverse perspectives enrich our lives. To further these ideals, we cultivate a vibrant landscape for writers and readers of fiction both locally and nationally.
SAVE THE DATE
We hope you will join PEN/Faulkner for the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award Celebration on May 15, 2025 at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in Washington, DC.