Literary Hub is pleased to announce the winner of the 2024 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, 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 for fiction goes to Sofi Stambo for her collection of short stories titled A Bunch of Savages, which 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-five 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.
