For her novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler has won this year’s PEN/Faulkner award, which honors the best works of fiction by American authors each year. Fowler, a finalist for this award back in 2002, is perhaps best known for her novel The Jane Austen Book Club. The award comes with a $15,000 purse. Judges for this year’s award were Madison Smartt Bell, Manuel Muñoz and Achy Obejas. The finalists, who each received $5,000, included Daniel Alarcón (At Night We Walk in Circles), Percival Everett (Percival Everett by Virgil Russell), Joan Silber (Fools), and Valerie Trueblood (Search Party: Stories of Rescue). Fowler and the finalists will be honored during an award ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC on May 10.

“This superb novel is not only comic and smart, it packs a surprising emotional punch,” said judge Muñoz. “Fowler captures an altogether new dimension of the meaning—and heartbreak—of family dynamics.”

“This is a book that really does tell us something new about what it is to be human—and what it is not to be,” added Smartt Bell.

Previous winners include Annie Proulx, Sherman Alexie, John Updike, Ann Patchett, and John Edgar Wideman.

Purchase tickets to the award ceremony and read more about Fowler, her winning book, the finalists, and the history of the PEN/Faulkner award here.

Photo credit: Brett Hall Jones