Atticus Lish has won the 2015 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction with his novel,
Preparation for the Next Life.
In announcing the award, PEN/Faulkner describes Lish’s book as “a document of the undocumented and an unlikely love story between a Chinese Muslim immigrant, Zou Lei, and a traumatized Iraq War veteran, Skinner… [which] forces readers to look squarely at a host of the failures plaguing contemporary American society. Lish’s prose is dogged and steadfast as he describes his characters’ raw reality and the desperate lives they struggle to lead.” (
penfaulkner.org)
Lish will be honored on May 2, 2015 at an awards ceremony. He and the
