Wilkinsburg author Deesha Philyaw wins PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Wilkinsburg author Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies,” continues to rack up awards.

On Tuesday, her book was announced as the winner of the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, which honors the best published works of fiction by American permanent residents in a calendar year.

“I wrote ‘The Secret Lives of Church Ladies’ in hopes that Black women would see and hear themselves in my characters who are all, in some way, striving to get free,” Philyah said in a statement. “Winning this award during a time of unconscionable loss, grief, and injustice, I’m reminded just how tenuous our freedom is. I’m reminded of and encouraged by Toni Morrison’s words: ‘The function of freedom is to free someone else.’ On the other side of this time of reckoning and the fight ahead, may we all be free.”

The book, published by West Virginia University Press, came out in September 2020.

“In ‘The Secret Lives of Church Ladies,’ her masterful debut collection of stories, Deesha Philyaw speaks in the funny, tender, undeceived voices of her title characters, who have more in common perhaps even than they know, from love to loss to God,” this year’s judges said in a statement. “In the group portrait that emerges, Philyaw gives us that rarest and most joyful fusion – a book that combines the curious agility of the best short fiction with the deep emotional coherence of a great novel.”

In March, Philyaw won the Story Prize (and its $20,000 award) for her debut collection. The book was also a finalist in fiction for the National Book Awards.

Actress Tessa Thompson is executive producing the adaption of the book as a series for HBO along with Philyaw, who is also writing the adaption.

“We are not a monolith, and in Deesha’s hands these women are allowed their untamed humanity,” Thompson told the Los Angeles Times. “They are at once funny, touching, heartbreaking and will make a stunning series.”