PEN/Faulkner Award 2010s: A decade of winners

The 2010s were a transformative decade for American fiction, and the PEN/Faulkner Award proved an astute chronicler of the era’s most vital literary voices. Named for William Faulkner and presented annually by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, this prestigious award has long celebrated exceptional fiction that pushes aesthetic boundaries and deepens our understanding of the human experience. During these ten years, the prize seemed particularly attuned to stories about displacement, identity, and the margins of American life—themes that resonated deeply as the country grappled with questions of belonging and representation. Sherman Alexie’s War Dances opened the decade with its sharp, inventive humor and Native American perspective, while later winners like Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club and Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers brought immigrant and cross-cultural narratives to the fore with unflinching emotional clarity.

What made this particular stretch of PEN/Faulkner honorees especially striking was the consistent elevation of formally ambitious work that refused easy categorization. Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves played brilliantly with narrative structure and genre expectations, while Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra, which closed out the decade, offered a deliberately fragmented, philosophical meditation on literature and displacement. The award seemed increasingly generous toward experimental forms and international perspectives—a reflection perhaps of both the literary landscape and the award’s own evolution as it sought to remain relevant to contemporary readers. These weren’t consensus picks; they were sometimes challenging books that demanded something from their audiences, yet the PEN/Faulkner Foundation recognized in each a distinctive voice worthy of attention.

Here’s the full roster of this remarkable decade: