The PEN/Faulkner Award is a literary prize for fiction that is given every year by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation in Washington, D. C. The prize tries to honor books that help people to understand each other and to live together in peace. The PEN/Faulkner Foundation believes that "fiction creates empathy within and among communities and advances civil discourse."
The award began in 1983. Writer Mary Lee Settle wanted to begin "the largest annual peer-juried prize for fiction in the United States." She named the award for International PEN and for William Faulkner who helped young writers with his own Nobel Prize money.
