The Westport Prize for Literature is an annual prize established to honor an original work of literary fiction that is both relevant and timeless. The prize is overseen and administered by a steering committee of Westport resident volunteers, with an independent jury selecting the winner.
The prize is open to an author of an original work of long-form fiction published in the United States each calendar year (between January 1, 2026, and December 31, 2026, for the 2026 prize). The submission window for the 2026 Westport Prize for Literature is January 5, 2026, to March 2, 2026, with the winner to be presented in November 2026.
The winner will receive a $10,000 prize and be invited to a special ceremony at the Library. The Edge of Water, the acclaimed debut novel from Olufunke Grace Bankole, was named the 2025 award winner; click here to watch the 2025 ceremony.
In this debut novel, Guinevere Sharpe has two childhoods — one near-feral and unspoken, growing up unwashed and underfed in rural Vermont, and another as a beloved character in her mother's wildly famous Ninth City fantasy series. Twenty years after a fire destroyed it all, Guinevere is coasting on her mother's name when her estranged brother announces a cryptic new art installation called Mother — and long-buried secrets begin to surface. A propulsive literary thriller about fame, survival, and the stories families tell to protect themselves.
The Sharaf family appears to have achieved everything — refugees turned prosperous, their eldest daughter Zorah the pride of a picture-perfect household. When an unthinkable tragedy strikes and the family is thrust into public scrutiny, the gap between their polished image and what happened behind closed doors becomes the novel's haunting central question. Told through a kaleidoscope of perspectives, Good People is a riveting, kaleidoscopic story about immigrant families, public facades, and how little we ever truly know about the people we think we do.
Ben Lerner's Transcription follows a narrator who travels to Providence for what will be the final interview with Thomas, a towering 90-year-old figure in the arts — only to arrive without a recording device, unable to explain why. What unfolds is an intimate exploration of mentorship, male friendship, and the triangle formed between Thomas, his son, and the narrator against the backdrop of early COVID. Transcription is a meditation on memory, technology, and what only fiction can truly capture.
The 2025 Westport Prize for Literature was awarded to Olufunke Grace Bankole for The Edge of Water, her beautifully realized epic tale following the lives of three generations of women across two continents.
The 2024 Westport Prize for Literature was awarded to Alejandro Puyana for Freedom is a Feast, his acclaimed debut novel, a multigenerational saga of love and revolution set in the author’s native Venezuela.
The 2023 inaugural Westport Prize for Literature was awarded to Zadie Smith, who was recognized for The Fraud, described by publisher Penguin Random House as “a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story — and who gets to be believed.”
