PEN/Faulkner Award 2018: Complete list of winners

The 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award celebrated some of contemporary fiction’s most compelling voices, with Joan Silber taking home the Fiction prize for her novel Improvement. The PEN/Faulkner Award, one of the largest peer-juried literary prizes in the country, has long championed American writers who demonstrate exceptional craft and ambition. Named after William Faulkner, the award emphasizes the importance of writers supporting writers—the judges are themselves accomplished authors who understand intimately what it takes to create meaningful fiction.

Silber’s Improvement stands as a testament to the kind of ambitious, interconnected storytelling the PEN/Faulkner Award tends to recognize. The novel weaves together multiple narratives across time and geography, exploring how people’s lives touch and transform one another in unexpected ways. It’s the sort of intricate, emotionally intelligent work that resonates with the award’s judging community, which values literary merit and innovative narrative structures.

Below, you’ll find detailed information about this year’s winning work and what makes Silber’s achievement particularly noteworthy within the broader landscape of contemporary American fiction.

Fiction

• Improvement by Joan Silber