Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing

Announcing the winner of the Restless Books 2025 Kellman Prize for New Immigrant Writing

PUBLISHED BY LITERARY HUB

DECEMBER 9, 2025

Literary Hub is pleased to announce the winner of the Restless Books 2025 Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature, an annual award given to a first-time, first-generation immigrant author that includes a $10,000 advance, a writing residency from Millay Arts, and publication by Restless Books. This year’s prize goes to Stephen Narain for his novel The Church of Mastery, which will be published in 2027.

Set at the dawn of World War II, The Church of Mastery follows a boy named William (Billy Boy) Jones as he tries to find his footing on a small Caribbean island where mangos grow and other boys pelt the back of his head with spitballs. William has discovered poetry, and must learn how to fight back and run fast. Eventually, he migrates to America. Searching for what he calls “the perfect poem” amid romantic loss and spiritual doubt, he finds himself traveling with a group of like-minded artists in the Deep South during the height of segregation. Is it possible to build a life around beauty when the world is only interested in institution and survival, capitalism and compromise?

Stephen tells us that while his work on the novel was inspired by the work of Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, James Baldwin, and Marilynne Robinson, “it also emerges from my own struggle to protect the sacred interior self in the face of empire, market, and institution.” He adds, “In a moment when immigrant literature is often expected to perform trauma or assimilation, the novel insists on a subtler revolution: the sovereignty of the inner life, the glories of transcendence.”

This year’s prize was judged by authors Dinaw Mengestu, Rajiv Mohabir, and Ilan Stavans, who have this to say about Stephen’s work:


“In dazzling prose that moves like a sea of poetry, Stephen Narain in his book The Church of Mastery presents to his readers the flayed and rigorous survival of a poet’s heart. The protagonist, William Jones, born in a fictitious Caribbean nation, wades through the weight of colonial education that does not prepare him adequately for his migration to the United States. On the outside of social circles, national identities, and family, I can’t help but see so much of the post-colonial Guyanese condition illuminated: always realization and deferred understanding until the protagonist stands firmly in ‘foreign,’ where there is no simple categorization of people or the deepness of the oceans they wade into remembering their wholeness. I love this Guyanese American book!”

— Rajiv Mohabir

“Stephen Narain’s wise and magisterial first novel is at once a story of home and migration, of love and loss, but above all it is a novel fully vested in the singular power of language and beauty to transform our world.”

— Dinaw Mengestu

“From the first lines it’s evident that this is a new voice, alive with the exuberance of language and a rhythm as natural and verdant as the scenes it describes. Only an immigrant novel could cover so much ground—here, the story of one young man’s determination to remain true to the life he wants, to a poetry only he can hear, unfolds into an improbable road trip through history and time, segregation and the Deep South, God and music, literature and irreverence, with a narrator that surprises at every turn.”

— Ilan Stavans


Stephen Narain was raised in the Bahamas by Guyanese parents and moved to Miami at seventeen. A graduate of Harvard College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the recipient of the John Thouron Prize at Cambridge University, the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, the Small Axe Fiction Prize, the Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing, and the Bristol Short Story Prize. His fiction and essays have appeared in Small Axe: A Platform for Caribbean Criticism, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Wasafiri’s special issue on the afterlives of indentured labor. Before beginning his PhD at the University of Miami, Stephen spent over a decade teaching literature and writing at the University of Iowa, Valencia College in Orlando, and The Door: A Center of Alternatives, a youth advocacy center in Lower Manhattan.

You can read an excerpt from The Church of Mastery in The Common.

Announcing the Finalists for the 2025 Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature

As reported today in The Common, this year marks the tenth anniversary of our Prize for New Immigrant Writing, which supports immigrant writers whose work examines how immigration shapes our lives, our communities, and our world. In honor of the anniversary, Restless Books’ unstintingly generous board member, Steven G. Kellman—whose grandparents were immigrants to the United States—has endowed the prize so that it may continue in perpetuity. As ICE and federal agents invade our cities, we hope the newly named Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature can serve as a reminder that immigrants’ voices deserve to be heard. Anyone familiar with history knows that immigrants have always been the gravitational center of the extraordinary American experiment.

Of course, freedom is not only under siege in America, but all across the globe. As autocrats deny the rights of people in Palestine, in Sudan, in Ukraine to remain on their own land, forced displacement is happening everywhere. 

The 2025 Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature was judged by Dinaw Mengestu, Rajiv Mohabir, and Ilan Stavans; the winner will be announced by LitHub on December 2. Please join us in celebrating the work of the following four finalists, and in holding up the power of immigrant stories to remind us of our common humanity. No one is free until all of us are free.

Jaguar by Beto Caradepiedra

Eleven interwoven stories follow a Panamanian family across four generations of loss, triumph, and devotion in Jaguar, charting their way through the shifting landscapes of Panama and New York City. Hunted by crocodiles and jaguars, protected by dogs and the sea, each new offspring faces their own privations to survive, sustained by family, community, doubt, and determination.

READ THE EXCERPT

The Conviction of Things Not Seen by Isabel Cristina Legarda

Haunted by preoccupations with ancestry, displacement, faith, and loss, the stories collected in The Conviction of Things Not Seen explore the lives of Filipinos at home and in the Philippine diaspora, and their ability as immigrants to straddle two worlds. Here, a matriarch and her neighbors living in a Manila cemetery try to build a life in the shadow of drug raids and failed relationships; a concert pianist’s collaboration with a visiting artist brings up challenging memories from her past; four women host ghost tours at a Savannah bed-and-breakfast; and a young woman murdered under a totalitarian regime is investigated as a candidate for sainthood through her friends’ letters, journal entries, and text messages.

READ THE EXCERPT

The Church of Mastery by Stephen Narain

At the dawn of World War II, a boy named William (Billy Boy) Jones is trying to find his footing on a small Caribbean island where mangos grow and other boys pelt the back of his head with spitballs. William learns how to run fast, discovers poetry, and eventually migrates to America. Searching for what he calls “the perfect poem” amid romantic loss and spiritual doubt, he finds himself traveling with a group of like-minded artists in the deep South during the height of segregation. Is it possible to build a life around beauty when the world is only interested in institution and survival, capitalism and compromise?

READ THE EXCERPT

Announcing the Winner of the 2024 Prize for New Immigrant Writing: Sofi Stambo!

We are thrilled to share the announcement published in Literary Hub that this year’s Prize for New Immigrant Writing in fiction goes to Sofi Stambo for her collection of short stories titled A Bunch of Savages! It will be published in Spring 2026. The characters in the collection have come from all over the world to New York City, where they dance and laugh their way out of difficult situations and into even messier ones, struggling to play parts that fate seems to assign them at random. They run in and out of diners, offices, and painter’s workshops, gesticulating to explain themselves, never knowing the right words, or if they do, voicing them in a way only other immigrants can understand. Their nostalgia transforms the big city into their little Italy or little Odessa or little Sofia. With pathos and humor, scenes from the narrator’s former life in Bulgaria weave into the mix like dreams.

This year’s prize was judged by authors Rivka Galchen, Priyanka Champaneri, and Ilan Stavans, who have this to say about Sofi’s work:

“Sofi Stambo’s wondrous, unpredictable and extraordinarily perceptive humor lights up these pages, and occasionally even sets them on fire. A Bunch of Savages is a superb investigation into the contrary, bemusing, feral and fearsome facets of our shared human character.”

—Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“Sofi Stambo’s prose is effervescent and her humor razor sharp, but it’s her empathy that won my heart. From Bulgarian beaches to city diners, these slice-of-life stories follow characters both heady with hope and noble in defeat, shaping a collection that’s ultimately an ode to the strange wonder of being alive.”

—Priyanka Champaneri, author of The City of Good Death

“In our dark age in which outsiders are easily—and lazily—satanized, Sofi Stambo offers an essential antidote: humanization. There is an ecumenical quality to her perspective. Her characters, no matter where they come from, are quirky, complex, emblematic, and, more than anything else, unique. A Bunch of Savages lusciously pushes immigrant literature to new heights.”

—Ilan Stavans, publisher of Restless Books and author of Sabor Judio: The Jewish Mexican Cookbook

Sofi tells us, “I immigrated to the US twenty-seven years ago. Living in New York, I had to learn to hear, think, and write in English rather than my native Bulgarian or equally strong Russian. To think exclusively in English, to dream in it as proof of fluency has been a challenge. The way people struggle to express themselves because of cultural, educational, and language barriers is what interests me most as a writer.”

Sofi Stambo’s stories have been published by Promethean, Ep;phany, The Kenyon Review, The MacGuffin, New Letters, Fourteen Hills, New England Review, Stand, American Short Fiction, Guernica, AGNI, Chicago Quarterly Review, Granta Bulgaria, Tin House, Another Chicago Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, and The Rumpus. She was awarded the 2024 LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for short fiction, won the first prize in fiction in the 2015 Dzanc Books/Disquiet International literary contest, was selected by WIGLEAF for their 2016 best flash top list, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2018. Her novel All In is a finalist for the LANDO award from The de Groot Foundation 2023. Stambo has a master’s degree in Literature from Sofia University St. K. Ohridski, Bulgaria.

You can read an excerpt from A Bunch of Savages in The Common. Congratulations, Sofi!