L to R: Olufunke Grace Bankole, Nicole Cuffy, and Jennifer Haigh
The Edge of Water by Olufunke Grace Bankole, O Sinners by Nicole Cuffy, and Rabbit Moon by Jennifer Haigh are the finalists for the 2025 Westport Prize for Literature, awarded annually to honor an original work of literary fiction that is both relevant and timeless.
This year’s winner will be announced in late summer/early fall and honored at The Westport Library on Thursday, November 6. The conversation with the winning author will be moderated by The Yale Review editor Meghan O’Rourke.
This is the third year for the $10,000 prize, whose inaugural grant was awarded in 2023 to renowned novelist Zadie Smith for The Fraud, which was named as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Independent. The 2024 recipient was Alejandro Puyana, honored for his acclaimed debut novel, Freedom is a Feast.
The Edge of Water is the first novel for Bankole, the Nigerian American writer and Harvard Law School graduate whose 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.
Prior to O Sinners, Cuffy wrote Dances, which was longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. Cuffy, who has an MFA from The New School and is a lecturer at the University of Maryland and Georgetown University, has also been published in the New England Review; The Masters Review, Volume VI (curated by StoryFest 2024 keynote speaker Roxane Gay); Chautauqua; and Blue Mesa Review.
Haigh is the author of seven best-selling works of fiction. Her first, Mrs. Kimble, won the PEN Hemingway Award for debut fiction, and her book prior to Rabbit Moon, Mercy Street, was named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker and won the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Haigh is a Guggenheim fellow and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
“Once again this year the community response to this project has been fantastic!” said Candice Savin, chair of the Westport Prize for Literature steering committee. “I am so pleased with the quality of the submissions this year. The prize is attracting impressive literary talent. No doubt the winner in conversation with Meghan O’Rourke on November 6 will be a very special evening at The Westport Library.”
Submissions for the 2025 prize were read and vetted by a team of volunteer readers — numbering nearly 50 for this year — with the best-reviewed manuscripts advancing to the jury that will select 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.
The Edge of Water by Olufunke Grace Bankole
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.
“An artfully constructed, beautifully told, and utterly moving book. A thrilling debut.” —Jami Attenberg, author of A Reason to See You Again
O Sinners by Nicole Cuffy
Faruq Zaidi, a young journalist processing the recent death of his father, a devout Muslim, takes the opportunity to embed himself in a cult known only as “the nameless,” because its members refused to label themselves. Based in the California redwoods and shepherded by an enigmatic Vietnam War veteran named Odo, “the nameless” adhere to the 18 Utterances, including teachings such as “all suffering is distortion” and “see only beauty.” Faruq, skeptical but committed to unraveling the mystery of “the nameless,” extends his stay over months, as he gets deeper into the cult’s inner workings and alluring teachings. But as he gets closer to Odo, Faruq himself begins to unravel, forced to come to terms with the memories he has been running from while trying to resist Odo’s spell.
“A gorgeously written literary excavation of belonging and belief.” —Emma Donoghue, The Boston Globe
Rabbit Moon by Jennifer Haigh
Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared for: their 22-year-old daughter Lindsey, teaching English in China during a college gap year, has been critically injured in a hit and run accident. At a Shanghai hospital they wait at her bedside, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. The accident unearths a deeper fissure in the family: the shocking event that ended the Litvaks’ marriage and turned Lindsey against them. Estranged from her parents, she has confided only in her younger sister, Grace, adopted as an infant from China. As Claire and Aaron struggle to get their bearings in bustling, cosmopolitan Shanghai, the newly prosperous “miracle city,” they face troubling questions about Lindsey’s life there, in which nothing is quite as it seems.
“Capturing both the possibilities of reinvention and the scars carried from a traumatic past, Haigh's searing novel examines the interplay between choice and chance.” —Booklist
