Garth Greenwell (MFA 2015) has been selected as the winner of the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his newest novel, Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
The longlist for this year's award also included Workshop alumni Ruben Reyes, Jr. (MFA 2021), for There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, and Ben Shattuck (MFA 2013) for The History of Sound.
From PEN/Faulkner:
"Garth Greenwell has wrought a narrative of illness and identity in visceral detail, conveyed with a precision of language that steals the breath,” said this year’s judges. “The novel’s harrowing narrative is also a mode of anti-narrative that traces the textured chronology of hospital life. Even as the narrator’s body succumbs to needles, scans, blood draws, and bureaucracy, the novel affirms the power of art, love, and connection–if not to heal, then to soothe and salve. Small Rain is a dazzling, gutting, unforgettable novel."
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, Cleanness, and Small Rain. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, among other journals, and his nonfiction has appeared widely, including in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Yale Review. He writes regularly about culture for the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Book Award, and the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His books have been translated into fifteen languages. He lives in Iowa City and New York, where he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.
"I wrote Small Rain as a way of testing, in the wake of a sudden and bewildering health crisis, my protagonist’s faith in art as a source of durable meaning, of transcendence,” said Garth Greenwell. “I am immensely grateful to the judges for this honor, and immensely moved to see my book included among such excellent writers."
For more information:
"Announcing the Winner of the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction" [PEN/Faulkner Website News]