This week, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced the finalists for the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. A three judge panel—comprised of authors Bruce Holsinger, Deesha Philyaw, and Luis Alberto Urrea—considered 414 novels and short story collections published in the US during the 2024 calendar year.
The recognized books represent a wide gamut, from major and independent publishing houses. There’s a story collection set in a fanciful Lagos. Among the novels selected, there’s an intimate psychological reflection, a richly woven family yarn, reclaimed historical fiction, and high satire. Two spouses—Everett and Senna—will square off for the top prize.
Here are the finalists.
‘Pemi Aguda, Ghostroots (W.W. Norton & Company)
Susan Muaddi Darraj, Behind You Is the Sea (Harpervia)
Percival Everett, James (Doubleday)
Garth Greenwell, Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Danzy Senna, Colored Television (Riverhead)
And here’s what the judges had to say about the finalists:
These five books moved us with their compassion, their imagination, their quiet artistry. They view our world from oblique and unsettling angles while giving us new ways to comprehend the often unimaginable: illness, displacement, enslavement, exile. Yet they also burst with humor and light, with characters who gleam and sing from the page. Enthralling and often transcendent, these books give us hope for the prospects of fiction-making in an uncertain future and fill us with gratitude for the resiliency of art.
This year’s winner, announced in April, will receive $15,000. The remaining four finalists will each receive an honorarium of $5,000.
All five authors—along with this year’s PEN/Faulkner Literary Champion, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden—will be honored on May 15 at the 45th Anniversary PEN/Faulkner Award Celebration.
