Dear writers, readers, agents, editors, and literary citizens: The deadline for the 2018 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing has been extended by one month, until March 31, 2018. Please spread the word to any first-generation, first-time writers in your circles! For this year's Prize, Restless is offering $10,000 and publication to a debut book-length work of fiction by a first-generation immigrant of any country. We're looking for groundbreaking, extraordinary fiction that grapples with the realities of immigration, migration, and the complexities of our ever-changing world. The first winner of the fiction prize was Deepak Unnikrishnan for his novel Temporary People, which won the Hindu Prize, was nominated for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was named a best book of 2017 by San Francisco Chronicle and Kirkus. We can't wait to publish the next great immigrant fiction debut!
Meet the 2018 Immigrant Writing Prize Judges
Téa Obreht's debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a 2011 National Book Award Finalist and a New York Timesbestseller. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading, and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Vogue, Esquire and Zoetrope: All-Story. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. She lives in New York and teaches at Hunter College.
Ilan Stavans is the Publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast "In Contrast."