Elizabeth McCracken is the winner of the 2026 PEN/Bernard and Ann Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.
McCracken made her literary debut in 1993 with the story collection Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, and followed it up three years later with the novel The Giant’s House. She went on to publish the story collections Thunderstruck & Other Stories and The Souvenir Museum and the novels Niagara Falls All Over Again, Bowlaway, and The Hero of This Book.
“Elizabeth McCracken’s short stories are meticulously crafted with such intelligence and heart,” Jung Yun, the PEN Faulkner Foundation’s chair of the Malamud committee, said in a statement. “She embraces her characters and grants them the dignity of fully imagined interior lives, rich with humor and irony, heartbreak and grief. With each collection, McCracken’s stories renew the form’s old promise that a few thousand words can hold a whole life. Reading her is a welcome reminder of why people fell in love with short fiction in the first place.”
McCracken said, “Short stories—writing them, reading them—have been a way for me to understand every angle of my life and the lives of others: microscope, telescope, periscope. They have given me so much over decades that it feels impossible to summarize what the PEN/Malamud means to me. Everything, really. It’s a prize that has been given to so many of my most important influences and my most beloved writers, and named after one of our greatest. I won’t say I’m humbled, because in my private moments I’m insufferably happy to be in such company, and also incredibly grateful and astonished.”
The PEN/Malamud Award was established in 1988. Previous winners include Eudora Welty, Joyce Carol Oates, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Edwidge Danticat.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
