Lagos-born writer ’Pemi Aguda has been named a finalist for the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her novel Ghostroots (published by W.W. Norton & Company).
The PEN/Faulkner Award, known as the country’s premier peer-juried prize for fiction, recognizes outstanding literary works published in the United States. Aguda’s Ghostroots was selected from a pool of 414 eligible novels and short story collections submitted by 166 publishing houses.
In a statement celebrating this year’s finalists, PEN/Faulkner Awards Committee chair Lauren Francis-Sharma praised the selected works, describing them as:
“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”
The judging panel, which included Bruce Holsinger, Deesha Philyaw, and Luis Alberto Urrea, commended the finalist books saying:
“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.”
’Pemi Aguda, an MFA graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, has steadily built a reputation for her storytelling. Her works have appeared in Granta, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, and other publications. She has also been honored with the O. Henry Prize for short fiction.
Aguda’s recognition as a PEN/Faulkner finalist places her in esteemed company alongside fellow finalists Susan Muaddi Darraj (Behind You Is the Sea), Percival Everett (James), Garth Greenwell (Small Rain), and Danzy Senna (Colored Television). The ultimate winner, who will receive a $15,000 prize, will be announced in early April, while the remaining finalists will each receive an honorarium of $5,000.
The award ceremony is set to take place on May 15 at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C., where all five finalists, along with the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Literary Champion, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, will be honored.
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Congratulations ‘Pemi Aguda!
Bakare Oluwatobiloba
I write to educate, motivate and define history with literature. Just being me!
