‘Pemi Aguda and Percival Everett are on the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction 2025 shortlist announced on Monday, March 3, 2025.
The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, first handed out in 1981, is awarded annually by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation to the authors of the year’s best works of fiction by living US American citizens. Some of the previous winners have been Imbolo Mbue in 2017 and Deesha Philyaw in 2021.
The 2025 jury is comprised of novelist, literary scholar, and editor of New Literary History Bruce Holsinger, author Deesha Philyaw, and author Luis Alberto Urrea. They 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, and they announced a longlist on Monday, February 3, before the shortlist was revealed on Monday.
The jury said, “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.”
The shortlist has the following writers of African descent on it;
- Ghostroots, ‘Pemi Aguda
- James, Percival Everett
The winning book—the “first among equals,” selected from the five finalists—will be announced in April. The authors of the five finalist books will be honored at the PEN/Faulkner Award Celebration, at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library on May 15.
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