‘Small Rain’ named 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) has been selected as the winner of the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, worth US$15,000 (A$23,771). Small Rain was chosen from a shortlist of five, out of 414 eligible novels and short story collections by American authors published in the US in 2024.

Greenwell is an author of novels and short fiction, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Book Award, and the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His books have been translated into 15 languages. He lives in Iowa City and New York, where he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.

Judges Bruce Holsinger, Deesha Philyaw, and Luis Alberto Urrea said, ‘Garth Greenwell has wrought a narrative of illness and identity in visceral detail, conveyed with a precision of language that steals the breath. 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.’

The PEN/Faulkner Award is a peer-juried literary prize awarded to ‘the best published works of fiction by American permanent residents in a calendar year’. The 2024 winner was Claire Jimenez for What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central Publishing).