Garth Greenwell won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). He will receive $15,000, with the other shortlisted writers each getting $5,000. All five will be honored May 15 at the annual PEN/Faulkner Award Celebration in Washington, D.C., featuring an appearance by the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Literary Champion, Dr. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, along with other special guests, including book critic Ron Charles.
"We are deeply indebted to our panel of judges for dedicating themselves to the difficult task of selecting this year's winner among an impressive and brilliant array of stories," said awards committee chair Lauren Francis-Sharma. "In each, we see the extraordinary gift of fiction as it opens new paths to truth. We are excited to celebrate Small Rain, along with our other finalists, at this year's awards ceremony in May."
The judges noted that Greenwell "has wrought a narrative of illness and identity in visceral detail, conveyed with a precision of language that steals the breath. 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."
"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 Greenwell. "I am immensely grateful to the judges for this honor, and immensely moved to see my book included among such excellent writers."