Every winner, newest first
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Winners
1981 to 2026
Winners by year
Newest first. The year links to everything published or awarded that year.
About the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction is an American prize judged entirely by writers. The novelist Mary Lee Settle founded it in 1980 and named it for William Faulkner, who had used his Nobel Prize money to set up a prize for younger writers, and it has been given every year since 1981. Three writers judge each year and name one winner as the first among equals. Novels and story collections are both eligible, so the list below mixes the two. The years are award years: Philip Roth's The Human Stain, published in 2000, won in 2001. Each winning book links to a summary and the story of its award.
- Awarded by
- PEN/Faulkner Foundation
- First awarded
- 1980
- Country
- United States
- Winner receives
- $15,000, and $5,000 to each of the other four finalists
When it is announced
The winner is announced in April, after a longlist of ten in February and five finalists in March, See the full announcement calendar.
How to enter
Publishers, agents and authors submit online for a fee, with submissions open from July to the end of September in recent cycles. Books must be fiction published in the United States in the calendar year by a living American citizen or permanent resident; a translation is eligible only when the author made it.
Official prize site. Checked August 2026. Dates move year to year, so confirm on the official site before entering.