April 11, 2024, 6:03am

In a ceremony on Wednesday night, the Whiting Foundation announced the ten new recipients of the Whiting Award, an award “designed to recognize excellence and promise in a spectrum of emerging talent.” The award comes with a monetary prize of $50,000 which aims to give winners “the chance to devote themselves full time to their own writing, or to take bold new risks in their work.”

Past winners include Colson Whitehead, Anne Boyer, Jericho Brown, Mitchell S. Jackson, Yiyun Li, Ocean Vuong and Daniel Alarcón.

The 2024 Whiting Award winners are:

Aaliyah Bilal (Fiction)
Yoon Choi (Fiction)
Shayok Misha Chowdhury (Drama)
Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig (Drama)
Elisa Gonzalez (Poetry)
Taylor Johnson (Poetry)
Gothataone Moeng (Fiction)
Charif Shanahan (Poetry)
Javier Zamora (Nonfiction and Poetry)
Ada Zhang (Fiction)

“This year’s winners have made liminal space their own—that place of potential that exists between states, whether those are genres, languages, countries, or definitions of self,” said Courtney Hodell, Whiting’s Director of Literary Programs, in a statement. “The rigor and fluid beauty of their writing make us excited for the work to come.”