The finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction have been revealed, with Imbolo Mbue and Rabih Alameddine among the authors making the cut.
Mbue made the shortlist for How Beautiful We Were, her second book. Mbue won the PEN/Faulkner award in 2017 for her debut novel, Behold the Dreamers.
Alameddine, who was a National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for his novel An Unnecessary Woman, was shortlisted for his latest, The Wrong End of the Telescope.
Nawaaz Ahmed was named a finalist for his debut, Radiant Fugitives; the novel was also longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
Carolyn Ferrell’s Dear Miss Metropolitan, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, made the longlist, as did Carolina de Robertis’ The President and the Frog, a nominee for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.
In a statement, the judges for this year’s prize, Eugenia Kim, Rebecca Makkai, and Rion Amilcar Scott, said, “The voices you’ll find in the five PEN/Faulkner award finalists speak in strange frequencies, lower registers, voices often unheard. But these are sounds that demand we listen, books that delight us first with their sentences, endear us to their characters, and then slowly alter and derange our senses, shifting our perspectives, forcing us to see the world in all its complexity and beauty as only the best literature can.”
The winner of the award will be announced next month.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
