PEN/Faulkner Award 2014: Complete list of winners

The PEN/Faulkner Award has long served as one of American literature’s most prestigious honors, celebrating the year’s finest literary fiction while deliberately steering clear of commercial popularity contests. The 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction went to Karen Joy Fowler for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, a novel that exemplifies exactly why this award matters in the literary landscape. Fowler’s inventive narrative, which plays with perspective and memory in surprising ways, resonated with the judging panel as a work of genuine artistic ambition and emotional depth—the kind of book that might get overlooked in a crowded marketplace but represents exactly the sort of boundary-pushing fiction the award was established to honor.

What makes Fowler’s win particularly notable is how We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves manages to be both intellectually rigorous and deeply human, a balance that the PEN/Faulkner Award has championed since its founding in 1981. The novel’s exploration of family, identity, and the unreliable nature of our own narratives exemplifies the kind of literary sophistication the award recognizes. For readers seeking to understand what contemporary American fiction looked like in 2014, Fowler’s win offers an excellent entry point—a reminder that the most important literary conversations often happen outside the bestseller lists, in the pages celebrated by organizations like PEN/Faulkner that prioritize craft and innovation.

Here are the complete 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award winners:

Fiction

• We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler