In partnership with The Common, we are delighted to announce the shortlist for the 2021 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Awarded this year for nonfiction, the prize supports the voices of immigrant writers whose works straddle cultural divides, embrace the multicultural makeup of our society, and interrogate questions of identity in a global society. The winner will receive $10,000 and publication with Restless Books. This year’s judges, Francisco Cantú, Shuchi Saraswat, and Ilan Stavans, have selected the below four finalists. Read excerpts from all finalists over at The Common.
Drifts by Natasha Burge
A strikingly original exploration of autism and psychogeography, Natasha Burge’s Drifts takes us through the souks, caves, and sands of the Arabian Gulf to create a loving and sensorial meditation on place and transcultural identity. In gorgeous poetic prose, Burge probes her unfurling awareness of autism, connecting seemingly tangential thoughts and wanderings with the anchored histories of the Arabian Gulf. The scenic and descriptive power of Burge’s writing is remarkable, bringing to life vivid landscapes, city streets and markets, desert sunsets, and unseen waters flowing beneath the earth.
By Its Right Name by Ani Gjika
By Its Right Name is a courageous and profoundly intimate story of recognizing and reclaiming the power of one’s sexuality. Ani Gjika intricately reconstructs her personal history in America, Albania, and beyond, naming traumas that often remain unspoken. By Its Right Name is a different kind of immigrant story, one that demands that we consider the specific, insidious ways that patriarchy controls a woman’s relationship to desire and sex, as well as to her body, mind, and expression. With a poet’s ear, Gjika finds language for confronting patriarchy, misogyny, and the male gaze on the most intimate of terms, ultimately revealing the transformational power of self-discovery through the written word.
Endanger Animals by Lisa Lee Herrick
The illuminating essays in Lisa Lee Herrick’s Endangered Animals describe contemporary Hmong American culture and community with journalistic vigor and a keen sensitivity. With great authority, Herrick interrogates what is lost in personal, ancestral, and cosmic terms when a family leaves the homeland that holds their history, their forebears, their mythologies. Displaying a deeply felt sense for the customs, rituals, and folkways that re-evoke left-behind terrain, she conjures it anew amidst the unfamiliar realities of immigrant life. How do we maintain a diasporic culture? How can we uphold and bolster the spirit in the face of war, migration, and forced adaptation and erasure? These essays of startling range and vision provide new ways of thinking about these essential quandaries of our age.
Family Dictionary of the Twentieth Century by Nina Kossman
This is a lyrical, panoramic exploration of a family tree shaped by the cataclysms of history. In this assemblage of memories, Kossman exhumes displaced, forgotten, and buried family stories in order to make whole what has been scattered and destroyed by Nazism and Stalinism, while also attempting, through her devotion to her Russian émigré parents, to keep whole the family that still lives. In the tradition of W. S. Sebald, Nina Berberova, and Natalia Ginzburg, Kossman probes questions of “outsider”-ness within one’s own immigrant communities and friendships, plumbs the subconscious, and maps the incomprehensible scale of twentieth-century events and the intimate inheritance of its traumas. These vignettes in Family Dictionary of the Twentieth Century—these entries—build to an immensely moving conclusion about what it means to be the carrier and keeper of a family’s history.
ABOUT THE FINALISTS
Natasha Burge was born in Saudi Arabia, where her family has lived for three generations over 60 years. Still living in the Arabian Gulf, and writing on transcultural identity and transcultural space, she is interested in exploring stories that emerge from the interstice. She was previously the writer-in-residence at the Qal’at al Bahrain Museum. After earning an MSc from the University of Edinburgh, she is now in her final year of a PhD program at the University of Lancaster. She has published short stories, poetry, journalism, and essays, and her writing has been anthologized, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and translated into Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese. Natasha’s unpublished novel, The Way Out, was longlisted for the 2020 Dzanc Prize for Fiction.
An Albanian-born writer, Ani Gjika is the author and literary translator of eight books and chapbooks of poetry, among them Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013), a finalist for the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Her translation from the Albanian of Luljeta Lleshanaku’s Negative Space (New Directions and Bloodaxe Books, 2018) won an English PEN Award and was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize, PEN America Award, and Best Translated Book Award. She is a graduate of Boston University’s MFA program where she was a 2011 Robert Pinsky Global fellow, and GrubStreet’s Memoir Incubator program where she was a 2019 Pauline Scheer Fellow. Having taught creative writing at various universities in the U.S., and Thailand, Gjika currently teaches English as a Second Language at Framingham High School in Massachusetts.
Lisa Lee Herrick is an award-winning Hmong-American writer, illustrator, and producer based in California. She is the co-founder of the LitHop literary festival, editor at large for Hyphen magazine, and advises nonprofit arts & public broadcasting organizations in media strategy. She is working on her debut memoir—a collection of personal essays—and a graphic novel, and her writing is honored in the Best American Essays (2020-2021) and Best American Food Writing 2020. She is a regular contributor to The Rumpus, and was named a 2021 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow in Creative Nonfiction. She earned a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Davis. You can connect with her on social media (@lisaleeherrick) and find her latest work at lisaleeherrick.com.
Nina Kossman is a Moscow-born bilingual writer, poet, translator of Russian poetry, painter, and playwright. Among her published works are three books of poems in Russian and in English, two volumes of translations of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems, two books of short stories, an anthology she put together for Oxford University Press, several plays, and a novel. Her work has been translated into French, Greek, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Persian, Danish, and Dutch. Her Russian poems and short stories have been published in major Russian literary magazines in and outside of Russia. Several of her plays have been produced off-off Broadway and in London, and her poems appeared in major anthologies, such as Gospels in Our Image, Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths, 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium, etc. She is a recipient of a UNESCO/PEN Short Story Award, an NEA fellowship, and grants from Foundation for Hellenic Culture, the Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, and Fundación Valparaíso. She lives in New York.
Read excerpts from all of the finalists over at The Common.
Congratulations to the finalists! And many thanks to the judges and to everyone who shared their work with us this year.