LOCAL AUTHOR WINS PEN/FAULKNER AWARD
“The Secret Lives of Church Ladies,” a collection of short stories by Wilkinsburg author Deesha Philyaw, has won the 2021 PEN/ Faulkner award, a major fiction prize.
Ms. Philyaw will receive a $15,000 cash award and be honored at a virtual award celebration on May 10. In March, she received The Story Prize, which includes a $20,000 award, for the book.
In January, HBO Max optioned “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies” for a series and is adapting it for television. Ms. Philyaw is writing the series and serving as executive producer with Tessa Thompson.
Ms. Philyaw said that Larry Dark, director of The Story Prize, told her that she is the first author to win it and the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction for the same book. Adam Johnson, author of “Fortune Smiles,” won the 2015 National Book Award and The Story Prize in 2016. Edwidge Danticat, the author of “Everything Inside,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award and The Story Prize in 2020, Mr. Dark said.
The three judges for this year’s PEN/Faulkner award for fiction were Charles Finch, Bernice L. McFadden and Alexi Zentner. The panel considered 419 novels and short story collections by American authors in 2020.
“Deesha Philyaw speaks in the funny, tender, undeceived voices of her title characters, who have more in common perhaps even than they
know, from love to loss to God,” the judges said in a prepared statement. The collection of stories “gives us that rarest and most joyful fusion — a book that combines the curious agility of the best short fiction with the deep emotional coherence of a great novel,” the judges said.
In 2015, Ms. Philyaw was chosen for the Kimbilio Fiction Fellow program, an annual writers retreat held each July on the Taos, N.M., campus of Southern Methodist University. For seven days, fellows and faculty gather in the Carson National Forest to read, write and learn from each other.