James Hannaham’s novel about racism and exploitation in the US, Delicious Foods, has won the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction, a prestigious US literary prize that has gone in the past to authors such as E Annie Proulx and Philip Roth.
Featuring crack cocaine as one of its narrators, Delicious Foods tells the story of a drug-addicted woman, Darlene, who is forced into de facto enslavement on a farm, and of her son, Eddie, whose hands have been cut off. A citation from the judges said it was “at once a sweeping American tale of race and exploitation, a darkly comedic thriller and an intimate portrayal of a troubled mother and her damaged son”, and that Hannaham was “unafraid of the complex and the horrible, and yet his novel shines in its intimate details”.
The novelist, who teaches creative writing at the Pratt Institute, told the Washington Post after his win that he had been surprised by the success of Delicious Foods. “I thought it was such a misfit, but it’s turning out to be a lot more popular than the kid I thought it was,” he told the paper. “It’s visceral, and one of its main questions is about dismemberment as the unsettling endgame of discrimination. It’s also nasty, and it’s not at all genteel. It’s not a novel that tries to be about the small things that happen to literary people.”
The book, which beat titles by authors including Julie Iromuanya and Viet Thanh Nguyen to the $15,000 (£10,600) PEN/Faulkner prize, is Hannaham’s second novel. The New York Times said that its “finest moments are … in the singular way that Hannaham can make the commonplace spring to life with nothing more than astute observation and precise language”.
The PEN/Faulkner is for the best work of fiction by an American citizen, and is judged by three writers, with Abby Frucht, Molly McCloskey and Sergio Troncoso forming this year’s panel. It is one of the largest peer-juried awards in the US, with almost 500 novels considered this year.
