Atticus Lish Wins 2015 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Atticus Lish has won the 2015 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his first novel, Preparations for the Next Life. He will take home $15,000, and each of the four finalists—Jeffery Renard Allen, Jennifer Clement, Emily St. John Mandel, and Jenny Offill—will receive $5,000.
The award judges—Alexander Chee, Marc Fitten, and Deirdre McNamer—considered 360 novels and short story collections by American authors published in the U.S. during the 2014 calendar year. Lish's winning book is a a document of the undocumented and an unlikely love story between a Chinese Muslim immigrant, Zou Lei, and a traumatized Iraq War veteran, Brad Skinner.
“Preparation for the Next Life represents a certain kind of triumph over fiction that hedges its bets," said McNamer. "With ferocious precision, Atticus Lish scours and illuminates the vast, traumatized America that lives, works and loves outside the castle gates. The result is an incantation, a song of ourselves, a shout.”
