Garth Greenwell has been named the winner of the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his novel Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the organization announced this week. The prestigious literary prize, valued at US$15,000 (A$23,771), recognizes the best work of fiction by an American author published in the previous year.
Selected from a competitive field of 414 eligible novels and short story collections published in the United States in 2024, Small Rain was chosen from a shortlist of five finalists.
Greenwell, whose work spans novels and short fiction, is a recipient of numerous accolades, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Book Award, and the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for excellence in prose style. His writing has been translated into 15 languages. He currently resides in Iowa City and New York, where he serves as a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.
Judges Bruce Holsinger, Deesha Philyaw, and Luis Alberto Urrea praised Small Rain as “a narrative of illness and identity in visceral detail, conveyed with a precision of language that steals the breath.” They described the novel as both harrowing and transcendent, noting its powerful depiction of hospital life and its affirmation of “art, love, and connection—if not to heal, then to soothe and salve.” They concluded: “Small Rain is a dazzling, gutting, unforgettable novel.”
In response to the award, Greenwell said: “I wrote Small Rain as a way of testing, in the wake of a sudden and bewildering health crisis, my protagonist’s faith in art as a source of durable meaning, of transcendence. I am immensely grateful to the judges for this honor, and immensely moved to see my book included among such excellent writers.”
The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction is one of the United States’ most esteemed literary honors. It is a peer-juried prize awarded annually to a work of fiction by an American permanent resident. The 2024 award was presented to Claire Jimenez for What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central Publishing).
