The PEN Faulkner Foundation awards the best fiction written by American citizens each year with the PEN Faulkner Award for Fiction. Each of the four runner-ups earns US$5,000, while the winner receives US$15,000. At the presentation event held in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Great Hall in Washington, D.C., the finalists recited passages from their works. It is allegedly “the largest peer-judged award in the country,” according to the organisation. In 1981, the prize was first presented.
History behind Pen/Faulkner Award.
The William Faulkner Foundation was created by William Faulkner in 1949 with the money he received for winning the Nobel Prize; one of the foundation’s charity objectives was “to establish a fund to support and encourage future fiction authors.” This led to the development of the PEN Faulkner Foundation. The William Faulkner Foundation Award, the foundation’s first honour for a “notable first novel,” was given to John Knowles’ A Separate Peace in 1961. After 1970, the foundation was dissolved.
Following the controversy surrounding the 1979 National Book Honor, when PEN voted for a boycott on the grounds that the award had grown too commercial, Mary Lee Settle was one of the creators of the PEN/Faulkner award. The literary organisation International PEN is connected to the prize.
The honour is one of many PEN prizes that PEN International affiliates in more than 145 PEN centres worldwide sponsor.
Submission Process Eligibility for 2023:
- Books must be released in 2022.
- Authors must be current, lawful residents of the United States.
- Books must be released by a small, academic, or commercial press that has been judged.
- We do not accept self-published books.
- There are no application forms or submission costs.
- Books that will be published in November or December of 2022 may be submitted with advanced reading copies or proofs.
- Translation: Only the author’s own translations made from another language into English are acceptable; translations made by third parties are not.
- The deadline for all entries is October 31, 2022.
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The writers are allowed to submit as many books as they want. To submit your book, you just need to the mail address given on their website. The PEN Faulkner Foundation Board of Directors selects three writers each year to serve as judges, assuring that there is no outside influence on how our prizes are decided. These judges choose 10 novels for the initial longlist, then five for the finalists, and lastly one for the “first among equals” prize.
Pen Faulkner Award Winners 2022
In 2022, the Pen Faulkner award was presented to Rabih Alameddine for The Wrong End of the Telescope; Nawaaz Ahmed for Radiant Fugitives; Carolina de Robertis for The President and the Frog; Carolyn Ferrell for Dear Miss Metropolitan; and Imbolo Mbue for How Beautiful We Were.
The PEN Faulkner Foundation promotes reading and writing relationships to enliven and uplift both individuals and communities. They are committed to the idea that when all voices are included in our conversations and when tales from a wide range of perspectives enrich our daily lives, our culture thrives. They hold that the written word is crucial for fostering civic conversation and fostering empathy within and between communities.
Rabih Alameddine - Faulkner Award Winner 2022
BlueRose Publishers have an award called BlueRose Awards for the authors who publish with us. Regardless of their genre, language, or geographic location, the prize aspires to recognise significant literary luminaries in the world of literature. The goal of the BlueRose Book Awards is to honour authors who have consistently worked to improve society.
The goal of BlueRoseONE is to bring together under one roof the many true stories of well-known and up-and-coming authors. This area will provide readers and writers with a platform to explain and investigate the various shades of an author’s journey.
