April 4, 2023, 3:13pm
Today, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation has announced the winner of the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction: Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose (FSG).
The Book of Goose was chosen by a panel of judges (Christopher Bollen, R.O. Kwon, and Tiphanie Yanique) from 512 eligible novels and short story collections written by American authors and published in the US in 2022. “Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose is a dazzling, conventions-defying, nuanced novel,” said this year’s judges in a statement. “It’s a tale of a complicated friendship, of two girls bending toward and away from each other. The prose is singular; the central characters, Agnès and Fabienne, haunted us with their radical ingenuity and bold, unruly ambitions. We kept finding that we wanted to press this book on others. It is an honor to give Yiyun Li the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.”
“I am deeply honored, thrilled, and grateful for this award,” said Li in a statement. “Writing a novel is like sending a message in a bottle to the unknown. To receive this recognition is a heartwarming confirmation that someone has found the bottle and read the message. My deepest gratitude to the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, to the judges, and to my fellow finalists: it’s always a good day when people read literature with care and thoughtfulness.”