Mahreen Sohail’s Small Scale Sinners, a wide-ranging debut collection of stories set everywhere from a college campus to a training camp for child soldiers, has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.
"With sharp and striking prose, Small Scale Sinners performs the magical feat of encompassing every aspect of humanity in a slim volume of stories, which reveals the hearty landscape of desire, rage, love, and loss contained in nearly every life,” PEN/Faulkner Awards Committee Chair Lauren Francis-Sharma said in a statement released recently.
Mahreen is from Pakistan and now lives in Washington, DC.
In a statement, she said she worked on the book for a decade to "map out possible ways of being an independent woman in the world.”
Mahreen will receive US$15,000 (RM59,000) for the award, which in previous years has been given to authors including Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Ann Patchett among others. - AP
