PEN/Faulkner Award 2000s: A decade of winners

The 2000s were a transformative decade for the PEN/Faulkner Award, which had already established itself as one of American letters’ most prestigious honors for fiction written by American citizens. As the new millennium unfolded, the award became a fascinating barometer of what serious literary fiction looked like in an era marked by geopolitical upheaval, technological acceleration, and a deepening introspection about American identity. The decade saw the PEN/Faulkner recognize everything from immigrant narratives grappling with displacement and war to sweeping revisionist histories and intimate character studies, reflecting a literary culture increasingly concerned with how we remember ourselves and navigate belonging in a fractured world.

What strikes most about this stretch of PEN/Faulkner Award winners is the recurring presence of certain literary titans alongside bold newcomers. Philip Roth’s back-to-back victories for The Human Stain (2001) and Everyman (2007) bookended the decade with meditations on aging, complicity, and the American experience. Ha Jin earned recognition twice—for Waiting (2000) and War Trash (2005)—establishing himself as a singular voice on the immigrant condition and the psychic costs of displacement. Yet the award also championed Ann Patchett’s operatic Bel Canto (2002), E.L. Doctorow’s ambitious The March (2006), and Joseph O’Neill’s genre-bending Netherland (2009), suggesting an award confident in its eclecticism and unafraid to honor formally inventive fiction alongside traditional realism.

The PEN/Faulkner Award of the 2000s seems to have been asking: what does American fiction owe to its own mythologies, and how do our stories change when we examine them from unexpected angles? That question echoes through the decade’s honorees in ways both subtle and profound. Explore the full retrospective below to see how these winners shaped the literary landscape of their time.