Meet Priyanka A. Champaneri, Winner of the 2018 Prize for New Immigrant Writing

Today, Literary Hub announced the winner of the 2018 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing for Fiction: Priyanka A. Champaneri, for her novel The City of Good Death. As detailed below in the judges' citation and author's statement about her book, The City of Good Death is an insightful and moving novel about life, death, and the afterlife. The book is scheduled to be published in the Spring of 2020. Read an excerpt here.

Judges’ Citation

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. Priyanka A. Champaneri beautifully explores the sacred and the afterlife in this cinematic and emotionally gripping work about living and dying with dignity.

Champaneri draws on her personal navigation of identity and culture, reconciling her Indian heritage and Hindu religion within a Western construct as a first-generation immigrant who was born and raised in the United States. The City of Good Death confronts family, religion, and belonging in ways that reflect Champaneri’s cultural dualities. It’s a novel full of compassion as Champaneri deftly navigates Pramesh’s relationships with his dying patrons as he himself struggles to understand the ramifications of his cousin’s death. Introducing readers to an unforgettable cast of characters who all cross paths in Pramesh’s hostel on this holy pilgrimage, this ambitious novel offers readers a unique insight into the Hindu concepts of the afterlife and the sacred, and the universally recognizable desire for empathy and understanding.  

—Judges Téa Obreht and Ilan Stavans

Author’s Statement on The City of Good Death

Born to Indian parents hailing from the state of Gujarat, I am a first-generation novelist who has lived my entire life in Virginia. My parents filled my childhood bookshelves with fairy tales and richly-illustrated volumes of Hindu religious myths, and they freely shared their memories of childhood in India. As the years passed, I grew to know these stories until I felt that they lived inside of me. When I finally visited India as an adult for the first time, I had the unique experience of feeling the imagined country in my heart fuse with the very real and tangible land and people before my eyes. That simultaneous overlap and disconnect between reality and myth is something I have both struggled with and enjoyed exploring in my writing.

Set in the holy city of Benares, The City of Good Death follows Pramesh, the manager of a hostel which specifically serves dying pilgrims seeking the ultimate solace of a good end. I have always had a faint knowledge that Benares was an important city, but my interest was not fully piqued until a co-worker sent me an Associated Press article titled ‘Check-in and Die in Two Weeks, or Get Out.’ As I read about the death hostels, I realized that I possessed a unique point of view: as a Hindu, I understood that these places of refuge for the dying were a perfectly practical solution to a goal that many in India have: dying a good death. But as someone raised in a Western society, I also understood how odd this attitude might seem to those unfamiliar with India, and especially Benares, where death is so blatantly placed alongside everyday life. It took me eight years to fully explore and hone the story which burgeoned in my mind, but the end result is a novel and a writing experience which I am grateful for.

Priyanka A. Champaneri Author Bio

Priyanka A. Champaneri was born and raised in Virginia. She received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University and has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts numerous times. The City of Good Death is her first novel.

Submissions for the 2019 Prize for New Immigrant Writing in Nonfiction Are Now Open

• To be judged by Héctor Tobar, Terry Hong, and Ilan Stavans.

• Submissions can take the form of a memoir, a collection of essays, or a book-length work of narrative nonfiction. We accept complete manuscripts or detailed proposals with a 25k-word sample.

• Submissions are accepted through February 2019.

• Winner receives $10,000 and publication by Restless Books

Read more and find out how to submit on our Prize page.

THE END by Fernanda Torres wins Jabuti Award for Brazilian Book Published Abroad

We are thrilled to announce that The End by Fernanda Torres has won the prestigious Jabuti Award, Brazil’s biggest literary prize! The End received the Jabuti Award for Brazilian Book Published Abroad, a new category that recognizes excellence in the translation and promotion of Brazilian literature internationally. A huge hit in Brazil, selling more than 150,000 copies, The End centers on five friends in Rio de Janeiro who, nearing the end of their lives, are left with memories—of parties, marriages, divorces, fixations, inhibitions, bad decisions—and the physical indignities of aging. Alison Entrekin’s translation masterfully captures Torres’ “agile hand at establishing voice, pacing, and tone”(Foreword Reviews), and The End was included among the Best Covers of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review. This debut novel continues to impress and draw readers with its timely insight and tragically humorous exploration of friendship, aging, and death.

“The End, a riotous, sex-stuffed novel by Torres, which takes Technicolor pleasure in detailing the deaths of five incorrigible old beach bums of the Bossa Nova generation…. Her five men, whom she kills off in reverse chronology, are ‘united by male allegiance, women, and the beach, in that order’.... With America undergoing a mass reckoning with male sexuality, a novel like this feels both taboo and gleeful, a guilty kind of reprieve.”
—Hermione Hoby, The New Yorker

We’re excited to publish Fernanda Torres’ next novel in Summer 2019, Glory and its Litany of Horrors. Torres turns her acerbic wit and sharp psychological scrutiny to the world of acting in this wise and funny send-up of a generation that witnessed their ideas of art fall into the hands of the market, and their ideas of the future proven to be illusory as theater.

“An electrifying blend of comedy of errors with the old and not always good life, “Glory and its Litany of Horrors” is a corrosive panel of a generation that saw its idea of art succumbing to the market, to the superficiality of the hyperconnected world and to the collapse of their illusions. All of this with generous doses of sharp and bitter humor.”
—Blog da Companhia das Letras

Ilan Stavans asks "Why Should You Read 'Don Quixote'?"

In a recent Ted-Ed video, Ilan Stavans, Restless Books Publisher and noted Cervantes’ scholar, delves into the nature of character development and the continuing cultural importance of Cervantes’ masterpiece. Accompanied by endearing illustrations and animation, ‘Why Should You Read Don Quixote?’ explores the compelling personal growth of Don Quixote through his clumsy yet valiant antics with his steadfast companion Sancho Panza and the enduring popularity and relevance of what is widely considered to be the best-selling novel of all time. Ilan asks the perennial question: What makes this book so beloved? In exploring major themes and the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Stavans investigates underlying philosophical complexities in this tale of adventure, humor, love and friendship. Indeed, Cervantes’ work is not only considered by many to be the first modern novel, but it is also a “treatise on the power of creativity and individualism that has inspired art, literature, popular culture and even political revolution” that continues to resonate with readers on a global scale.

TED-Ed, an extension of TED, carefully curates educational videos with animations, many of which represent collaborations between talented educators and animators nominated through the TED-Ed website. TED-Ed, not unlike TED, is committed to creating lessons worth sharing and spreading great ideas. Watch the TED-Ed video to learn more about Don Quixote and check out the Restless Classics edition of Don Quixote with beautiful illustrations by Eko and an introduction by Ilan Stavans.

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