Winners of the 2025 Whiting Awards
The Whiting Foundation
hide
tilting legend
The Whiting Foundation
Whiting Foundation announced the winners of their Whiting 2025 awards for emerging writers on Wednesday evening.
The prices, celebrating their 40th year, helped launch the writing careers of many authors now known, notably Colson Whitehead, Ocean Vuong, Alice McDermott and Jia Tolentino. Many have won prestigious literary prizes, including Pulitzer prizes and the National Book Awards.
This year’s winners come from a diversified range of racial and ethnic backgrounds – and from the country and the world. They are poets, playwrights, novelists and historians. The winners each receive $ 50,000, with the idea that this will allow them to give a certain freedom to perfect their profession.
In a statement, Courtney Hodell, director of Whiting literary programs, said about the group: “These writers demonstrate an amazing range; everyone invented the tools they needed to cut their stories and their worlds.”
Here are the winners of the Whiting 2025 Prize:
(with the comments of the White Committee)
Elwin Cotmanauthor of four new collections and the novel The age of ignorance (To come this year), whose speculative fiction is “exuberant sites … Illuminants of humor of debauchery and horror … His stories embark on a fabulist stratosphere, but their parabolic trajectory plunges them into a reality that does not atte”
Emil FerrisAuthor of graphic novels My favorite thing is the monsters And My favorite thing is the monsters: the book twowhose work “explode gender and form expectations and modify the way readers understand their experience of family, memory and art”
Samuel Kọentsláwọléauthor of The road to the Sea of Saltwhose work is “populated by unforgettable characters which he presents with unthinkable choices … his portrait of immigrants via and towards the stirring of unknown funds with an indelible testimony”
Claire Luchetteauthor of Agatha of the little neonwhose fiction is “from funny laughter and proves that the great charm does not prevent the great depth … This writer is a portrait painter of the negligent, the ungovernable, the believers trying to take their oscillations of faith in stride”
Shubha SunderAuthor of the News Collection Boomtown girl And the novel Optional practical trainingof which “the narration is confident, her prose loaded; she compresses everyday life with the kind of force that makes carbon in a jewel”.
Aisha Sabatini SloanAuthor of the Essais collection Dreaming of Ramadi in DetroitIncluding the collection of cultural criticisms “dazzles with surprising links between the staff and the collective. It is the obsessive testimony of the one who feels an intruder born … always alert but fearless, it makes her own spaces”
Sofi Thanuserauthor of Worn out: the history of the clothes of a peoplewhose literary journalism transmits an “only elegant intelligence … (its) curiosity is a gift to the reader; its sentences are as superimposed as its surveys, which resemble a devoted intensity on the objects that surround us which could otherwise escape our attention.”
Karism Prizeauthor of I’m still as seriousIncluding the collection of poems impregnated with the history of New Orleans Pre- and post-katrina are “songs, howls, portraits, criticism … Price prices and time, bringing together unexpected interlocutors to give meaning to what cannot make sense- but the effort is sanctifying”
Annie westrupDena’ina poet and author of The Museum of Constant Nature HistolesWho “questions history and its institutions, reminding us that beauty and commerce, nostalgia and revision, the mythical and daily, are not opposites but parents.”
Entertainment
