Reading List · Literary Prizes
The first winner, in 1981, was Walter Abish’s How German Is It. The most recent, in 2026, was a first collection of twelve short stories from a small press. In between, Philip Roth won it three times, more than anyone else, and ten of the winners were not novels at all. The prize is judged by three fiction writers each year, and every one of the five finalists is paid.
By Lisanne Swart · 46 winners since 1981 · Judged by writers · All literary prizes · Last reviewed 22 September 2026
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Publishers can enter books until 30 September 2026. For the 2026 award the five finalists were announced on 2 March and the winner on 6 April, and the dates for 2027 will be added here once they are announced.
Quick answer
The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction goes each year to one book of fiction, a novel or a collection of stories, by a living American citizen or permanent resident. It was first given in 1981, it is judged by three writers, and it is worth $15,000 to the winner and $5,000 to each of the other four finalists. There have been 46 winners. The latest is Mahreen Sohail’s Small Scale Sinners (2026), a debut collection of stories. Philip Roth is the only writer to have won it three times.
How this page chooses
Two jobs, kept apart. The timeline further down lists all 46 winners from 1981 to 2026, and marks the ones that are collections of stories — facts only.
The ten with a full entry are simply the ten most recent, 2017 to 2026, one for each year. There is no ranking in it and no shortlist of favourites. Under each one is a line of plain fact about the book or the author, and nothing that cannot be checked.
Oldest first, one for each year. The line in red is a fact about the book or its author, not an opinion about it.
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Jende Jonga, who has come to New York from Cameroon, gets a job as the chauffeur of Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers, while his wife Neni studies to become a pharmacist. Then the bank collapses in 2008, and both families, the one in the front of the car and the one in the back, start to come apart.
It was Mbue’s first novel, and Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club in 2017.
Reyna, a single mother in Harlem, backs out of her boyfriend’s plan to smuggle cigarettes, and the decision runs on into the lives of people she will never meet. Behind her stands her aunt Kiki, who lived in Turkey in the 1970s. The book is a novel told as a chain of stories, each one handing over to the next.
It also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
Zebra is the last of a family of self-taught Iranian intellectuals, and as a child she fled Iran with her father. After his death she sets out to retrace the route of their exile, with Barcelona as her base, carrying the books he made her learn by heart and falling into a hopeless affair with an Italian called Ludo.
The National Book Foundation named Van der Vliet Oloomi one of its 5 Under 35 writers in 2015.
Luisa, seventeen, leaves her parents’ home in Mexico City and runs off with a boy called Tomás to the beach at Zipolite, on the Oaxaca coast. They are looking for a troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs who are said to have escaped from a Soviet circus.
Chloe Aridjis is the daughter of the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis.
Nine stories about Black women and girls and the church: mothers and daughters, lovers and wives, and what they want for themselves when the church and the people in it want something else from them.
A debut collection from a university press, it was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2020.
Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor and a trans woman who lives in the United States, goes to the Greek island of Lesbos to help in a refugee camp. There she meets a family that has fled Syria, and the novel follows what a doctor can and cannot do for them in the time she has.
Alameddine’s earlier novel An Unnecessary Woman was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2014.
Agnès and Fabienne are two girls in a village in France after the Second World War. Fabienne makes up the stories and Agnès writes them down, and when a book of them comes out under Agnès’s name it takes her away from the village, as far as a boarding school in England, and away from her friend.
Yiyun Li was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010.
In 2008 Ruthy Ramirez, thirteen, does not come home from school on Staten Island. Twelve years later her mother and her two sisters think they see her on a reality television show called Catfight, and set out to find her.
It is Jiménez’s first novel; her first book was the story collection Staten Island Stories.
A poet in Iowa City is taken to hospital in March 2020, just as the pandemic closes everything down, with a tear in the wall of his aorta. The novel stays with him through the days in intensive care: the pain, the nurses, the other patients he can hear but not see, and the partner who is not allowed in.
Greenwell’s first novel, What Belongs to You, was longlisted for the National Book Award in 2016.
Twelve stories set in Pakistan and in the United States, about families, friendships, love and grief, and the small wrongs people do to each other. The judges said the book shows the “vast universes” inside ordinary domestic life.
Sohail’s debut, it was chosen from 387 books entered for the 2026 award.
All 46 winners, oldest first. The collections of stories are marked; the rest are novels. The ten years in red have a full entry above.
The award began after a quarrel. In 1979 PEN America voted to boycott the National Book Award, on the grounds that it had become too commercial, and the novelist Mary Lee Settle was one of the writers who set up a prize of their own. The first one was given in 1981.
The rule that came out of that has stayed: the judges are three fiction writers, not critics or booksellers, and they are chosen fresh each year. They read every book entered, choose five finalists and name one winner, and every finalist is paid, not only the winner. The ceremony is held in Washington, DC.
Most big fiction prizes go to novels. This one has gone to a collection of stories ten times, from Peter Taylor’s The Old Forest in 1986 to John Updike’s early stories and Deborah Eisenberg’s collected stories. Two of the most recent winners are first books of stories: Deesha Philyaw in 2021 and Mahreen Sohail in 2026.
The winners are not only the famous names. Next to Roth, DeLillo and Updike the list has small-press debuts and books from university presses, and the 2026 winner came from A Public Space, a literary magazine that also publishes books.
An American prize for fiction, given each year since 1981 to one novel or collection of stories by a living American citizen or permanent resident. It is judged by three writers and is worth $15,000 to the winner and $5,000 to each of the other four finalists.
Mahreen Sohail, for Small Scale Sinners, a debut collection of twelve stories published by A Public Space. The winner was announced on 6 April 2026.
Addie E. Citchens for Dominion, Quiara Alegría Hudes for The White Hot, Jonas Hassen Khemiri for The Sisters and Lily King for Heart the Lover.
Yes. Philip Roth won it three times, for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain and Everyman. John Edgar Wideman, E. L. Doctorow and Ha Jin have each won it twice.
Yes, and it often does: ten of the 46 winners are collections of stories, the latest being Small Scale Sinners in 2026.
$15,000 to the winner and $5,000 to each of the four other finalists.
The dates are not out yet. Submissions close on 30 September 2026; for the 2026 award the finalists were named in early March and the winner in early April.
With the ten most recent, which have a full entry on this page. For the other big American prize, my page on the Pulitzer Prize winners has every winner since 1980.
Winner list last verified 22 September 2026.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“This brief volume reveals the vast universes within the realm of the domestic.”
— The 2026 PEN/Faulkner judges, on Small Scale Sinners
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