We are thrilled to announce the longlist of books for the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, America’s most prestigious peer-juried literary prize. The longlist includes the following ten titles:

PEN/Faulkner Award 2023 Longlist Books

“This delightfully diverse list showcases the breadth of American literature,” said PEN/Faulkner Awards Committee Chair Louis Bayard, “and underscores our ongoing mission to champion fiction that matters.”

In selecting the longlist, this year’s judges—Christopher Bollen, R.O. Kwon, and Tiphanie Yanique—considered 512 eligible novels and short story collections by American authors published in the US during the 2022 calendar year. Submissions came from 205 publishing houses, including small and academic presses. From this longlist, the judges will select five finalists for the 2023 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 2023 JUDGES

Christopher Bollen is the author of five novels, including A Beautiful Crime in 2020. His latest novel, The Lost Americans, will be published by Harper in March 2023. Bollen also writes for a number of publications including the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Interview Magazine. He lives in New York City.

R.O. Kwon’s nationally bestselling first novel, The Incendiaries, is being translated into seven languages, and it was named a best book of the year by more than forty publications. The Incendiaries was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Prize, as well as five other prizes. Kwon and Garth Greenwell coedited the bestselling anthology Kink, recipient of the inaugural Joy Award and a New York Times Notable Book.Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the novel, Monster in the Middle, which was published in 2021, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards, and was on numerous best of the year lists. Tiphanie is also the author of the poetry collection, Wife, which won the Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the United Kingdom’s Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection, the novel, Land of Love and Drowning, which won the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award.  Land of Love and Drowning was also a finalist for the Orion Award in Environmental Literature and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. She is the author of a collection of stories, How to Escape from a Leper Colony, which won her a listing as one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 and the Bocas Prize in Fiction. Her writing has won the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship and an Academy of American Poet’s Prize. She regularly teaches at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Community of Writers and other programs.  Tiphanie is from the Virgin Islands and is an associate professor at Emory University.

ABOUT THE PEN/FAULKNER FOUNDATION

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation champions the breadth and power of fiction in America. We achieve that mission by administering the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story to help call the world’s attention toward literary achievements; by bringing free books and authors into under-resourced DC schools to inspire the next generation of readers and writers; and by curating public literary programs to amplify the work of accomplished authors. For more information, visit www.penfaulkner.org.

Save the Date

We hope you will join PEN/Faulkner for the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award Celebration, happening on May 11, 2023 at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library.