The Dos Passos Prize for Literature, awarded by Longwood University in Virginia, has announced its shortlist of five impressive writers who are in the running for 2024’s prize. The award honors a prolific American writer who displays “characteristics of John Dos Passos’s writing: an intense and original exploration of specifically American themes, an experimental approach to form, and an interest in a wide range of human experiences.”
This year’s finalists are:
– Luis Alberto Urrea: Good Night, Irene: A Novel (2023); The House of Broken Angels (2018); The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005)
– Victor LaValle: Lone Women (2023); The Changeling (2017); Slapboxing With Jesus (1999)
– Angie Cruz: How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water (2022); Dominicana (2019); Let it Rain Coffee (2006)
– Peter Rock: Passersthrough (2022); My Abandonment (2009); This is the Place (1997)
– Carter Sickels: The Prettiest Star (2020); The Evening Hour (2012)
Dr. David Magill, chair of the Department of English and Modern Languages at Longwood, wrote that the “finalists for this year’s Dos Passos Prize represent the wide range of possibilities in American fiction…Experimental narrative styles, challenging characters and lyrical prose mark all our writers, but each brings their own unique sense of language and vision to examine the United States in wonderful detail.”
The winner will be selected this December, to join an impressive cohort of past winners, including Maxine Hong Kingston (1998), Colson Whitehead (2012), Ruth Ozeki (2014), Paul Beatty (2015), Karen Tei Yamashita (2018), Rabih Alameddine (2019) and Monique Truong (2021).
