The shortlist had Lily King on it, and two titles from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The winner, announced on Monday, April 6, is a slim first book of short stories from a small independent press. Mahreen Sohail has won the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Small Scale Sinners, published last September by A Public Space Books, and we cannot think of a happier result.
The PEN/Faulkner calls itself America’s most prestigious peer-juried literary prize, meaning the judges are writers rather than critics or booksellers. This year they were the novelists Samantha Hunt, Tania James and De’Shawn Charles Winslow, who read 387 novels and story collections from 155 publishers. Sohail receives $15,000. The other finalists, Addie E. Citchens for Dominion, Quiara Alegría Hudes for The White Hot, Jonas Hassen Khemiri for The Sisters and King for Heart the Lover, each receive $5,000.
Twelve stories, one question
“In Small Scale Sinners, the magnitude of the small is roundly confirmed,” the judges wrote. “Sentences collect the infinite, and single lives contain multitudes.” The book’s twelve stories follow girls and women as daughters, sisters, wives and mothers, and keep circling the same question: what does it mean to be good? A chorus of sixth graders becomes obsessed with a pair of new twins. A girl cuts off her long hair for her boyfriend’s dying mother, only for him to wish at once that she hadn’t. In “Basic Training,” the story that gives the book its title, two sisters watch a group of child soldiers, and one decides they were “only small scale sinners.”
Sohail was born in Islamabad, studied at Sarah Lawrence as a Fulbright Scholar and now lives in Washington. Her stories are plainly rooted in Pakistan, yet they never name it. She has explained that whenever she did, the story “immediately became claustrophobic,” so she let the place run underneath instead. “I wrote the stories in Small Scale Sinners over the course of a decade,” she said after the announcement. “With the book I was trying to map out possible ways of being an independent woman in the world.”
“With the book I was trying to map out possible ways of being an independent woman in the world”
Reviewers have been quick to single out “The Park,” in which a mother and daughter, both churails, the vengeful spirits of women who died tragically, go hunting one Sunday for a man who hits his wife. It is funny, alarming and entirely its own thing. Kirkus put the whole book rather well: “Sohail writes like a pointillist paints.”
An evening at the library
All five finalists were honored on May 6 at the 46th PEN/Faulkner Award Celebration, held at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington. The evening also celebrated Willee Lewis as this year’s PEN/Faulkner Literary Champion, and the critic Ron Charles was among the guests. Sohail now joins a list of recent winners that includes Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain, Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose and Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, the last of them, like hers, a debut book of short stories.
A word from the desk
Short stories rarely win the big prizes, and debut collections from small presses almost never do. When three working novelists read nearly four hundred books and choose this one, it is worth paying attention, and paying for a copy from your local bookshop.
News Editorial Desk, Pine Tree Shilling Publishing