Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland has been named winner of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Founded in 1980, the PEN/Faulkner Award is the largest peer-juried prize for fiction in the United States. As winner, O’Neill receives $15,000.
Praised for its richly accomplished prose and articulate portraits of characters in New York, Netherland is a novel which also examines the varying moods of its protagonist’s interior life—and passion for playing cricket.
“The thing that struck me so deeply about Netherland,” said PEN/Faulkner Judge, Randall Kenan, “is how much it is about the new and continuing immigrant story, about New Americans and the making of new American traditions, which has always been New York’s function in the world. O’Neill has created a powerfully entertaining novel, but also a new emblem for our time.”