Mahreen Sohail’s story collection ‘Small Scale Sinners’ wins the PEN/Faulkner prize

NEW YORK (AP) — Mahreen Sohail’s “Small Scale Sinners,” a wide-ranging debut collection of stories set everywhere from a college campus to a training camp for child soldiers, has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.

“With sharp and striking prose, ‘Small Scale Sinners’ performs the magical feat of encompassing every aspect of humanity in a slim volume of stories, which reveals the hearty landscape of desire, rage, love, and loss contained in nearly every life,” PEN/Faulkner Awards Committee Chair Lauren Francis-Sharma said in a statement released Monday.

Sohail is from Pakistan and now lives in Washington, D.C. In a statement Monday, she said worked on the book for a decade to “map out possible ways of being an independent woman in the world.”

She will receive $15,000 for the award, which in previous years has been given to authors including Philip Roth,Don DeLillo and Ann Patchett among others.