The Edge of Water, the miraculous, multi-generational debut novel by Olufunke Grace Bankole, is the winner of the 2025 Westport Prize for Literature, awarded annually to an original work of literary fiction that is both relevant and timeless.
Bankole will be honored at The Westport Library on Thursday, November 6, at 7 pm. (Click here to register.) She 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.
This is the third year for the $10,000 prize, whose inaugural grant was bestowed in 2023 to renowned novelist Zadie Smith for The Fraud, named as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Independent. In 2024, Alejandro Puyana was also honored for his acclaimed debut novel, Freedom is a Feast.
In addition to The Edge of Water, the 2025 Westport Prize finalists were O Sinners by Nicole Cuffy and Rabbit Moon by Jennifer Haigh.
“We are thrilled that the nominating committee and judging panel have honored Grace's skillful, mesmerizing debut novel, The Edge of Water, by naming it the winner of this year’s Westport Literary Prize,” said Molly Stern, founder and CEO of Zando, whose imprint, Tin House, published Bankole’s book. “This generous recognition of a work of uncompromising beauty is a true testament to Grace's achievement, and to all that the Tin House list strives to represent with its publishing.”
Bankole is 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.
The Nigerian American writer, who currently lives in Portland, Oregon, 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.
The Edge of Water follows Amina, who moves from Nigeria to New Orleans to forge her own path. 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.
The book 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.”
“The Edge of Water is a beautifully realized epic tale following the lives of three generations of women across two continents,” said Maurice Carlos Ruffin, author of The American Daughters. “Bankole expertly explores tenderness and heartache without sentimentality. This is a stunning addition to the canon of diasporic tales.”
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 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.
