Today the PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced the five finalists for its 2017 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The $15,000 prize is given annually for a work of fiction published in the United States in the previous year. Four finalists will each receive $5,000.
The finalists are: After Disasters (Little A) by Viet Dinh, LaRose (Harper) by Louise Erdrich, What Belongs to You (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Garth Greenwell, Behold the Dreamers (Random House) by Imbolo Mbue, and Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (Lee Boudreaux Books) by Sunil Yapa.
All the finalists except for Erdrich are debut novelists. Judges Chris Abani, Chantel Acevedo, and Sigrid Nunez selected the finalists from a pool of approximately five hundred books. The winner will be announced April 4, and the awards ceremony will be held May 6 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
Now in its thirty-seventh year, the PEN/Faulkner Award bills itself as the “largest peer-juried award in the country.” For more information about the prize and finalists, visit the PEN/Faulkner Foundation website.
(Photos from left: Viet Dinh, Louise Erdrich, Garth Greenwell, Imbolo Mbue, Sunil Yapa)