Today, Aspen Words announced its five finalists for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize, which awards $35,000 each year to “a work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture.” This year’s shortlist was chosen by a jury consisting of Dr. John Deasy, Louise Erdrich, Ben Fountain, Vanessa Hua and Tayari Jones.
Here are the finalists, along with what the jurors had to say about them:
Percival Everett, James
James, from its very title, is a trickster of a novel. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an unlikely briar patch through which Percival Everett escapes every expectation of the neo-slave narrative. With a wit sharp enough to injure as effortlessly as it amuses, this is a re-sculpting of the foundational narrative of America’s racial past. James is profoundly uncompromising; it refuses to sacrifice rigor in favor of plot, gravity in facility of humor, or invention in honor of the triggering chestnut. In the antebellum landscape of these pages, chattel slavery may be the law of the land, but language is the coin of the realm. By this measure, James—and by extension, his author—possesses riches beyond our imagining.
Afabwaje Kurian, Before the Mango Ripens
Set against the backdrop of a newly independent Nigeria, Afabwaje Kurian’s poignant and powerful debut examines the post-colonial reality in a story that is at once intersectional and deeply personal. With nods to Chinua Achebe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Kurian depicts 1971 Nigeria in such a way that it is rendered timeless and timely at once. Themes of faith, belonging, and self-governance intersect with the tumult and unpredictability of desire and community. Her prose shimmers as the plot simmers. Before The Mango Ripens announces a bold new voice in contemporary fiction.
Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars
Every tribal nation has its own story that deserves fierce emotional and intellectual telling. Wandering Stars, by Tommy Orange, Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, takes us from the Sand Creek Massacre to Oakland, California. On the way there, his characters become the bearers of America’s history of violence, the vessels of trauma and spirituality, and the wandering stars of addiction and redemption. Wandering Stars serves to deepen and inform Tommy Orange’s fine debut novel There, There, but it also stands on its own as a mesmerizing epic drama.
Ruben Reyes Jr., There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven
Inventive and exhilarating, There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven charts the Salvadoran diaspora in a dozen dazzling stories that cross borders, genres, space, and time. By turns fierce and tender, poignant and hilarious, Ruben Reyes Jr. examines questions of home and belonging, of immigration and identity. This stunning collection explores the possibilities of alternate histories and imagined futures in an extraordinary range of characters—a cyborg, a bisexual reggaeton star, a Martian outlaw, a migrant boy, and more. A bold, iconoclastic debut.
Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep
Isabel, the young Dutch woman at the heart of Yael van der Wouden’s searing debut novel The Safekeep, lives a solitary life in the comfortable country house that her family acquired in the midst of World War II. Now in her early thirties, Isabel is haunted by childhood memories of the war and no less by the mysterious origins of the house, which came fully furnished, with plates and linens and even a chest of toys that Isabel and her brothers were allowed to claim for their own. When Isabel’s older brother deposits his enigmatic, seemingly feckless girlfriend Eva at the house for a month, Isabel’s narrow bourgeois life explodes, and her most private self is forced into the light. Van der Wouden’s brilliant, fiercely passionate, and bracingly unsentimental novel explores with rare mastery the brutal legacies of war, erasure, genocide, and dispossession.
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The winner of the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize will be announced at a public awards ceremony on Wednesday, April 23 at The Morgan Library in New York City.
