Submissions are open for the 2020 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Now in its fifth year, the prize will award $10,000 and publication to a debut work of fiction by a first-generation immigrant. The 2020 judges, all immigrants themselves, are novelist Dinaw Mengestu, translator Achy Obejas, and Restless Books publisher Ilan Stavans. We seek extraordinary, culture-straddling writing from emerging writers that addresses identity in a global age. Submissions are open through March 2020.
We believe that immigrant stories are a vital component of our cultural consciousness; they help to ensure awareness of our communities, build empathy for our neighbors, and strengthen our democracy. We are proud that the winners of our immigrant writing prize have made a profound impact on readers, and we're looking forward to launching the career of the next great immigrant author!
See our prize page for the full guidelines and eligibility requirements, and read on to learn more about the judges and the past winners.
Meet the 2020 Judges
Dinaw Mengestu is the author of three novels, all of which were named New York Times Notable Books: All Our Names (Knopf, 2014), How To Read the Air (Riverhead, 2010), and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead, 2007). A native of Ethiopia who came with his family to the United States at the age of two, Mengestu is also a freelance journalist who has reported about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo. His articles and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Jane, and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, Guardian First Book Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He was also included in The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010.
Achy Obejas is the author of The Tower of the Antilles, which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner award. Her other books include Ruins and Days of Awe. As a translator, she’s worked with Wendy Guerra, Rita Indiana, Junot Díaz and Megan Maxwell, among others. A native of Havana, she currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
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."
Meet the Past Prize Winners
Antiman by Rajiv Mohabir
Winner of the 2019 Prize for nonfiction — coming spring 2021
"In Antiman, Rajiv Mohabir sets forth on a journey with few parallels in the history of immigrant literature. While tracing his ancestors’ peripatetic migrations from rural India to Guyana to Canada and the US, Mohabir examines both the bonds and disconnects between his American identity as a gay poet with the expectations and limitations of his diverse cultural inheritance.
"More than a memoir, this brave and beautiful book is a tale of the resilience of the human heart, and of multiple family journeys across generations and four continents."
—Terry Hong, Héctor Tobar, and Ilan Stavans, Judges' Citation
The City of Good Death by Priyanka Champaneri
Winner of the 2018 Prize for fiction — coming summer 2020
"The City of Good Death is an expansive novel about the proprietor of a death hostel, Pramesh, in India' s sacred city of Benares, where Hindus come to die a holy death, and the sweeping journey of discovery he embarks upon after finding his cousin and childhood best friend drowned in the Ganges. Champaneri beautifully explores the sacred and the afterlife in this cinematic and emotionally gripping work about living and dying with dignity."
—Téa Obreht and Ilan Stavans, Judges' Citation
The Body Papers by Grace Talusan
Winner of the 2017 Prize for Nonfiction
Grace Talusan’s critically acclaimed memoir The Body Papers powerfully explores the fraught contours of her own life as a Filipino immigrant and survivor of cancer and childhood abuse. A New York Times Editors' Choice selection and 2019 Critics' Pick, it's now available as an audiobook and will be out in paperback in March 2020.
Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan
Winner of the 2016 Prize for Fiction
Deepak Unnikrishnan's devastating novel-in-stories reveals the struggles and triumphs of a group of people who have been all but invisible in fiction: guest workers in the United Arab Emirates. It was named a best book of 2017 by Booklist, Kirkus, and San Francisco Chronicle and awarded the The Hindu Prize.