ZIMBABWE-BORN NoViolet Bulawayo, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, is this year’s winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for We Need New Names.
The novel follows a 10-year-old girl who leaves her shantytown in Zimbabwe to live with an aunt in Detroit.
Finalists for the award, which honours the best debut book of fiction by an American author, are The Residue Years, an autobiographical novel by Mitchell S Jackson, who is black and grew up in Portland, Oregon, and The Old Priest, a story collection by Anthony Wallace, who teaches writing at Boston University.
This year’s competition was so fierce that judges added a third honourable mention.
The honorees are Jasmine Beach-Ferrara’s Damn Love (Ig), linked stories set in San Francisco and North Carolina; Kristopher Jansma’s The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards about a young man’s quest to become a writer; and Ethan Rutherford’s The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories, a collection with historical and contemporary themes. — newzimbabwe.com