PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Each year the PEN/Faulkner Foundation recognizes the best published works of fiction by contemporary American writers. Named for William Faulkner, who used his Nobel Prize funds to create an award for young writers, and affiliated with PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists), the international writers' organization, the PEN/Faulkner Award was founded by writers in 1980 to honor their peers, and is now the largest juried award for fiction in the United States. The PEN/Faulkner Foundation's activities of outreach to the Washington community include the Writers in Schools Project. This program, begun with a grant from the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation in 1989, brings authors in the reading series to Washington public high schools to teach a class on the day of their reading. Teachers work with the authors in advance of the visit to prepare the students in the authors' works and to insure mutually profitable encounters between writers and students. PEN/Faulkner provides the students with copies of the authors' books, and complimentary tickets to the readings.

2003: The Caprices by Sabina Murray
2002: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
2001: The Human Stain by Philip Roth
2000: Waiting by Ha Jin
1999: The Hours by Michael Cunningham--BookMuse features The Hours
1998: The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor
1997: Women in Their Beds by Gina Berriault
1996: Independence Day by Richard Ford
1995: Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
1994: Operation Shylock by Philip Roth
1993: Postcards by E. Annie Proulx
1992: Mao II by Don Delillo
1991: Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman
1990: Billy Bathgate by E. L. Doctorow
1989: Dusk by James Salter
1988: World's End by T. Coraghessan Boyle
1987: Soldiers in Hiding by Richard Wiley
1986: The Old Forest by Peter Taylor
1985: The Barracks Thief by Tobias Wolff
1984: Sent for You Yesterday by John Edgar Wideman
1983: Seaview by Toby Olson
1982: The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley
1981: How German Is It? by Walter Abish