How Literary Awards Work: A Conversation with PEN/Faulkner Executive Director Gwydion Suilebhan

April 7, 2026·1 hr 15 min·5 clips

PEN/Faulkner's director describes calling winners and witnessing a profound emotional release that no prize money can replicate.

The setup is plain and institutional. Brad Listi brings in Gwydion Sullivan through the Penn Faulkner Foundation, a nonprofit behind annual awards for fiction, debut novels, short stories, and literary champion work. From there, the conversation moves into process. Listi asks how diversity and representation are being handled inside literary awards after years of imbalance in American publishing. He does not pretend the field is fixed, but he has noticed movement in the books coming through his show. The guest answers with history, not spin. Penn Faulkner's more varied finalist lists, he says, began before his own tenure. The long list mattered too. After it was added a year into his time there, more kinds of books could be seen. One detail lands: a previous finalist slate was made entirely of books by authors of color. The current list has ten books. He is careful about the mechanics. The foundation does not tell judges to select authors of color. It chooses judges with care. Race, gender, genre, point of view, and career stage are in the room before any book is weighed. That makes the answer feel less like branding and more like plumbing. The conversation keeps circling one quieter question: who gets invited to decide literary value?

As heard by us

A grounded look at literary awards, representation, and how judging panels are assembled.

It treats the Penn Faulkner Foundation as a working case study in how literary awards are shaped, with selection, representation, and judging all given real weight.

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Want to understand how a literary award actually gets judged?

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