Garth Greenwell Wins 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award

Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain (FSG) has been named as the winner of the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Small Rain was selected from a group of five finalists, which included Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda (W.W. Norton & Company), Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj (Harpervia), James by Percival Everett (Doubleday), and Colored Television by Danzy Senna (Riverhead).

As the winning author, Greenwell will receive $15,000, and the finalists will each receive $5,000.

This year’s judges were Bruce Holsinger, Deesha Philyaw, and Luis Alberto Urrea. They considered 414 eligible novels and short story collections by American authors published in the U.S. during the 2024 calendar year. Submissions came from 166 publishing houses.

“Garth Greenwell has wrought a narrative of illness and identity in visceral detail, conveyed with a precision of language that steals the breath,” said this year’s judges. “The novel's harrowing narrative is also a mode of anti-narrative that traces the textured chronology of hospital life. Even as the narrator's body succumbs to needles, scans, blood draws, and bureaucracy, the novel affirms the power of art, love, and connection—if not to heal, then to soothe and salve. Small Rain is a dazzling, gutting, unforgettable novel.”