James Hannaham received the 2016 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his second novel, Delicious Foods (Little, Brown), reports The New York Times.

The book tells the story of Darlene, a woman struggling with drug addiction who is  forced into slavery in Louisiana—and her relationship with her eleven-year-old son, Eddie—exploring, Ted Genoways writes in a review of the book, “the thorny nexus of systemic racism and the personal destruction that often hounds the hopeless.”

PEN/Faulkner’s announcement of the award cited Hannaham as “unafraid of the complex and the horrible, and yet his novel shines in its intimate details.”

Hannaham’s award includes a $15,000 cash prize. The four finalists—Julie Iromuanya for Mr. and Mrs. Doctor (Coffee House Press); Viet Thanh Nguyen for The Sympathizer (Grove Atlantic); Elizabeth Tallent for Mendocino Fire (HarperCollins); and Luis Alberto Urrea for The Water Museum (Little, Brown)—will each receive $5,000.

James Hannaham, a Bronx native, is not only a novelist, but has also worked as an actor, comedian, critic, journalist, and teacher. McSweeney’s Books published his first novel, God Says No, in 2009; his fiction has also been published in One Story, Open City, The Literary Review, and Nerve.com. He has written as a critic for The Village Voice, Spin, Vibe, Us, Out, Interview, and Salon.com, where he was a staff writer.

Photo Credit: PEN/Faulkner.