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2025 Westport Prize for Literature Award Ceremony and Author Conversation: ‘The Edge of Water’ by Olufunke Grace Bankole
Event Details
The Westport Prize for Literature celebrates its third edition by honoring The Edge of Water, the miraculous, multi-generational debut novel by Olufunke Grace Bankole, as the winner of this year's prize. Bankole will be awarded the prize in a ceremony held in the Trefz Forum and take part in a special conversation with The Yale Review editor Meghan O’Rourke.
There will be copies of The Edge of Water available for purchase at the event, with Bankole signing afterward.
The 2025 Westport Prize for Literature is awarded annually to an original work of literary fiction that is both relevant and timeless.
Why You Should Come
The Westport Prize for Literature is a celebration of literature and one of the literary highlights of the Westport calendar. Submissions for the 2025 prize were read and vetted by a team of Westport-based volunteer readers — numbering nearly 50 for this year — with the best-reviewed manuscripts advancing to the jury that selected this year’s winner. The jurors for 2025 are playwright and author Tommy Greenwald, book blogger and aggregator Suzanne Leopold, publishing industry veteran Erica Melnichok, The Lifeboat author Charlotte Rogan, and nonfiction writer and former Book of the Month Club judge Nina Sankovitch.
This is also an opportunity to hear from Bankole, one of the rising stars in literature, as she discusses her debut book with O'Rourke, the decorated editor of the legendary Yale Review.
The Edge of Water has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Foreword Reviews, and Goodreads included it as a “hottest debut novel of 2025.” In addition, Kirkus Reviews called The Edge of Water a “global, multigenerational novel suffused with heart, feeling, devastation, and hope” and Pen America said it is “a provocative story of mothers, daughters, and adopted family on both sides of the Atlantic.”
About the Book
Set between Nigeria and New Orleans, The Edge of Water tells the story of a young woman who dreams of life in America, as the collision of traditional prophecy and individual longing tests the bonds of a family during a devastating storm.
In Ibadan, Nigeria, a mother receives a divination that foretells danger for her daughter in America. In spite of this warning, she allows her to forge her own path, and Amina arrives in New Orleans filled with hope. But just as Amina begins to find her way, a hurricane threatens to destroy the city, upending everything she’d dreamed of and the lives of all she holds dear. Years later, her daughter is left with questions about the mother she barely knew, and the family she has yet to discover in Nigeria.
Exploring the love of a determined mother and dreaming daughter who do not say enough to each other until it is too late, the detangling of Yoruba Christianity, traditional religion, and folklore, and the tellings of three generations of daring women—through times of longing, promise, and romance, as well as heartbreak — Olufunke Grace Bankole’s The Edge of Water is a luminous debut novel about a young woman brave enough to leave all she knows behind, and the way her fate transforms a family destined to stay together.
Source: Tin House Publishing
About the Author
Olufunke Grace Bankole is a Nigerian American writer. A graduate of Harvard Law School, and a recipient of a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship, her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review, and Stand Magazine. She won the first-place prize in the Glimmer Train Short-Story Award for New Writers, and was the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, a residency-fellowship from the Anderson Center at Tower View, and has received a Pushcart Special Mention for her writing. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Source: Tin House Publishing
About the Moderator
Meghan O'Rourke is the author of the New York Times best-seller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness and The Long Goodbye, as well as the poetry collections Sun In Days, Once, and Halflife. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, and more. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, and a Whiting Nonfiction Award, she resides in New Haven, where she teaches at Yale University and is the editor of The Yale Review.
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