PEN/Faulkner Award 2020s: A decade of winners

The first half of the 2020s proved to be a transformative period for the PEN/Faulkner Award, America’s largest international prize for fiction. As the literary world grappled with questions of representation, authenticity, and who gets to tell which stories, the award’s selections reflected a significant shift in what contemporary American fiction was becoming. The PEN/Faulkner Award, named after the Mississippi master himself, has long positioned itself as a mirror to serious literary culture—less glitzy than some of its peers, more focused on prose craft and thematic weight. This decade’s winners embodied that commitment while also expanding whose voices and experiences the prize recognized.

From Chloe Aridjis’s dreamlike Sea Monsters in 2020 through Claire Jiménez’s gripping What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez in 2024, these winners shared a particular intensity of vision and a willingness to interrogate the nature of truth itself. Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, with its unflinching portrait of desire and faith, and Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose, a haunting meditation on friendship and mythology, showed an award increasingly drawn to stories that resisted easy resolution. Rabih Alameddine’s The Wrong End of the Telescope added another layer of formal experimentation to the mix. Together, these works suggested that the contemporary American novel—at least as the PEN/Faulkner Award saw it—was becoming more global in perspective, more fragmented in form, and more insistent on the complexity of lived experience.

What follows is a closer look at the entire decade of winners:

2020

Fiction

• Sea Monsters by Chloe Aridjis

2021

Fiction

• The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

2022

Fiction

• The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine

2023

Fiction

• The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

2024

Fiction

• What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jiménez