The PEN/Faulkner Foundation is pleased to announce that Amina Gautier and Joan Silber received the 2018 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.

Amina Gautier is a prolific and award-winning writer of short fiction. In myriad stories that captivate readers and critics alike, she complicates and illuminates the intersection of self and place, with characters who navigate the pitfalls and pleasures of claiming a complex identity in a world that at times seems to insist on simple answers. Her short story collections include At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, and The Loss of All Lost Things. Over 100 of her stories have appeared in such publications as African American Review, Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner. She lives in Chicago and Miami.

Joan Silber is one of the most respected writers working in America today. Called “America’s own Alice Munro” by Washington Post reviewer Charles Finch, Silber has long been admired for the depth and subtlety of her writing and the skill with which she elevates the material of ordinary life into work of extraordinary emotional weight. Silber has published four short story collections—In My Other Life, Ideas of Heaven, The Size of the World, and Fools—as well as four novels and the nonfiction work The Art of Time in Fiction. Her novel Improvement won the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She lives in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program.