The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has chosen Elizabeth McCracken as the winner of the 2026 PEN/Bernard and Ann Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, which recognizes writers who have demonstrated exceptional achievement in the short story form. McCracken will be honored at the annual PEN/Malamud Award Ceremony, held in partnership with American University, on October 4.
"Elizabeth McCracken's short stories are meticulously crafted with such intelligence and heart," said Malamud committee chair Jung Yun. "She embraces her characters and grants them the dignity of fully imagined interior lives, rich with humor and irony, heartbreak and grief. With each collection, McCracken's stories renew the form's old promise that a few thousand words can hold a whole life. Reading her is a welcome reminder of why people fell in love with short fiction in the first place."
McCracken is the author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction. Her short stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize, and on NPR's Selected Shorts. Her most recent collection, The Souvenir Museum, was longlisted for the National Book Award. Thunderstruck and Other Stories was also longlisted for the National Book Award and won the 2015 Story Prize.
"Short stories--writing them, reading them--have been a way for me to understand every angle of my life and the lives of others: microscope, telescope, periscope," said McCracken. "They have given me so much over decades that it feels impossible to summarize what the PEN/Malamud means to me. Everything, really. It's a prize that has been given to so many of my most important influences and my most beloved writers, and named after one of our greatest. I won't say I'm humbled, because in my private moments I'm insufferably happy to be in such company, and also incredibly grateful and astonished."
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Winners of the 2026 Australian Book of the Year Awards, voted on by Australian booksellers and sponsored by the Australian Booksellers Association, are:
ABA BookData Adult Fiction Award: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
ABA BookData Adult Non-Fiction Award: Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent
ABA Kids' Reading Guide Children's Award: Here Come the Cousins by Maggie Hutchings and Sarah Zweck