Atticus Lish’s debut novel Preparation for the Next Life, which charts the unlikely romance between an illegal Chinese Muslim immigrant and an Iraq war veteran in the New York borough of Queens, has won the PEN/Faulkner award.

Awarded in the past to some of the greatest names in American fiction, from Philip Roth and EL Doctorow to Don DeLillo and Annie Proulx, the PEN/Faulkner is judged by three writers and selected from 350 works of fiction. Lish beat shortlisted authors including Jenny Offill and Emily St John Mandel to win the $15,000 (£10,000) award. Judge Deirdre McNamer said Lish’s novel “scours and illuminates the vast, traumatised America that lives, works and loves outside the castle gates”, and results in “an incantation, a song of ourselves, a shout”, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Lish is the son of Raymond Carver’s legendary editor Gordon Lish, but made no use of his literary connections when finding a publisher for his debut, which was released by tiny press Tyrant Books last year. He told the New York Times earlier this year that he hadn’t even considered showing the novel to his father. “Absolutely not, no. If it had ever come up, I would have said to him, ‘With all respect, I’m not going to have an editor-writer relationship with you’,” said the novelist.

An advance of just $2,000 was forthcoming from Tyrant, according to the WSJ, and a mere 3,500 copies were initially printed – until rave reviews began to flood in from publications including the New York Times, which called it “perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade”.

Gordon Lish only found out about the novel when he was informed of its existence by a former student – but he was unconcerned, he told the NYT. “He could write rings around me,” he said of his son, “so who would I be to suggest to him how he might manage the composition of a sentence?”

Patrick Flanery’s Guardian review found that “in his determination to narrate America from the bottom, Lish seems influenced as much by Dickens as by American modernists such as Ralph Ellison and John Dos Passos”. Flanery praised his “faultless ear for the speech of New York’s working poor”, and his “tough lyricism [which] ultimately works to dissolve the barrier between book and reader, co-opting us into a great, multi-ethnic nomadic clan.”

Lish studied at Harvard University, but dropped out two years into his time as an undergraduate, working in a series of jobs and joining the Marines before taking a fiction workshop at the university in his 30s. According to Harvard Magazine, however, “his writing career began far earlier: Don DeLillo, a friend of his father’s, borrowed an extract from one of Lish’s fourth-grade compositions to end his novel The Names.”