Gwydion Suilebhan, executive director of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation since 2019, dates his almost giddy love of words to when he was 12, composing stories on his father’s old typewriter in their Pikesville, Maryland, home.
That passion propelled his career, which was further shaped by studying poetry while earning his master’s degree from The Writing Seminars in 1993.
“It gave me a discipline that has applied to every other writing challenge I’ve taken on,” says Suilebhan, a playwright and cultural critic.
What is the mission of PEN/Faulkner?
We champion the breadth and power of fiction in America. We’re most known for the PEN/Faulkner Award, which is the reason we were founded 46 years ago, but that’s actually the smallest share of what we do. The largest, from a budget perspective, is providing literary opportunities to Title I schools in Washington, D.C., with donated books, author visits, and writing instruction.
How are the PEN/Faulkner Award winners chosen?
Thankfully and appropriately, it’s not my job. We choose three accomplished writers with different perspectives, writing styles, and life experiences to serve as judges and ask them to find what’s excellent every year. Having said that, I do read our entire long list of 10 novels every year, as well as the novels on our PEN/Hemingway Award long list, strictly for my own pleasure.
What’s a typical day like for you?
No day is like any other. I do all the things that any arts administrator has to do—accounting, budgeting, meeting donors. I also help run literary programs and speak at award events and get to know authors. And I still maintain a thriving career as a writer.
As artificial intelligence gains prominence, do you worry that people are losing connection with the written word?
These are perilous times for those of us who understand that words are how we construct the human soul. Artificial intelligence is reducing the scope of possibility by tunneling inward, to paths that have already been traveled.
We have to oppose it because our job is to keep language fresh. Words are how we nurture and nourish the ecosystem in which we all live, the ecosystem of ideas and relationships.
