Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) has been selected as the winner of the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
“We are deeply indebted to our panel of judges for dedicating themselves to the difficult task of selecting this year’s winner among an impressive and brilliant array of stories,” said PEN/Faulkner Awards Committee chair Lauren Francis-Sharma. “In each, we see the extraordinary gift of fiction as it opens new paths to truth. We are excited to celebrate Small Rain, along with our other finalists, at this year’s awards ceremony in May.”
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 independent and academic presses.
“Garth Greenwell has wrought a narrative of illness and identity in visceral detail, conveyed with a precision of language that steals the breath,” said this year’s judges. “The novel’s harrowing narrative is also a mode of anti-narrative that traces the textured chronology of hospital life. Even as the narrator’s body succumbs to needles, scans, blood draws, and bureaucracy, the novel affirms the power of art, love, and connection–if not to heal, then to soothe and salve. Small Rain is a dazzling, gutting, unforgettable novel.”
Garth 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 in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Yale Review. He writes regularly about culture for the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Book Award, and the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His books have been translated into fifteen languages. He lives in Iowa City and New York, where he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.
“I wrote Small Rain as a way of testing, in the wake of a sudden and bewildering health crisis, my protagonist’s faith in art as a source of durable meaning, of transcendence,” said Garth Greenwell. “I am immensely grateful to the judges for this honor, and immensely moved to see my book included among such excellent writers.”
The PEN/Faulkner Award is America’s most prestigious peer-juried literary prize. As the author of the winning book, Greenwell will receive $15,000. The authors of each of the other finalists— ‘Pemi Aguda, for Ghostroots; Susan Muaddi Darraj, for Behind You Is the Sea; Percival Everett, for James; and Danzy Senna, for Colored Television—will receive $5,000. Recent winners include What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez, The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li, The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine; The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw; Sea Monsters by Chloe Aridjis; Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi; Improvement by Joan Silber; and Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue.
All five books and their authors will be honored at the annual PEN/Faulkner Award Celebration on Thursday, May 15, at 6 pm ET at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in DC. This in-person event will feature presentations by our judges; original readings by our five finalists; and an appearance by our 2025 PEN/Faulkner Literary Champion, Dr. Carla Hayden, the LIbrarian of Congress, along with other special guests, including book critic Ron Charles.