The debut novel Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj has been shortlisted in the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Awards alongside four other titles.
‘This year’s finalists offer us breathtaking voices from Palestinians in Baltimore, from Lagos, from a vivid Los Angeles and a hospital bed in Iowa City, as well as from the deep annals of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,’ said PEN/Faulkner Awards Committee chair Lauren Francis-Sharma.’These voices haunt, whisper, and invoke humor and terror. They make us feel deeply at a time when so many of us feel numb at the happenings of the world around us. In these pages we get the fullness of humanity, and we here at PEN/Faulkner cannot wait to celebrate these magnificent contributions to American fiction.’
Holsinger, Philyaw, and Urrea prepared the following statement: ‘These five books moved us with their compassion, their imagination, their quiet artistry. They view our world from oblique and unsettling angles while giving us new ways to comprehend the often unimaginable: illness, displacement, enslavement, exile. Yet they also burst with humor and light, with characters who gleam and sing from the page. Enthralling and often transcendent, these books give us hope for the prospects of fiction-making in an uncertain future and fill us with gratitude for the resiliency of art.’
The authors of the five finalist books will be honored at the PEN/Faulkner Award Celebration, which will be held at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library on May 15.