PEN/Faulkner Award 1998: Complete list of winners

The 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award recognized one of the year’s most unconventional literary achievements with its Fiction prize going to Rafi Zabor for The Bear Comes Home, a wildly imaginative novel that defied easy categorization. This award, one of the most prestigious honors for American fiction, celebrates writers whose work demonstrates exceptional literary merit—and Zabor’s surreal, jazz-inflected narrative about a saxophonist bear navigating human society certainly proved that the judges weren’t afraid to embrace ambitious, genre-bending storytelling. The PEN/Faulkner Award, named after the legendary William Faulkner and administered by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, has long distinguished itself by honoring serious literary fiction that might not always receive mainstream attention, making it a crucial benchmark in the American literary landscape.

Zabor’s victory that year underscored the award’s commitment to recognizing writers who take formal and thematic risks. The Bear Comes Home stands as a testament to the kind of experimental, imaginative fiction the PEN/Faulkner Award championed—the sort of work that rewards patient, adventurous readers willing to follow an author into unexpected territory. The 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award winners and finalists continue to represent a pivotal moment in 1990s American letters, when literary prizes increasingly sought to honor innovation alongside craft.

Below is the complete list of the 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award honorees:

Fiction

• The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor