PEN America has announced the finalists for the 2025 Literary Awards. Among the many honorees are Nigerian-American authors Iheoma Nwachukwu and Samuel Kọ́láwọlé!

The 2025 Literary Awards will confer nearly $350,000 to writers and translators. Spanning fiction, poetry, essay, translation, and more, these titles are dynamic, diverse, and thought-provoking examples of literary excellence.

Iheoma Nwachukwu’s Japa and Other Stories (University of Georgia Press) is a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, which confers a prize of $25,000 to an author whose debut collection of short stories represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise for future work.

Japa and Other Stories came out of a struggle Iheoma Nwachukwu faced when trying to orient himself in the United States of 2017 to 2021, when attitudes toward immigrants suddenly shifted. The Japa characters explored in this book are immigrants who have no plans to return to their home country–for voluntary reasons–although they retain a strong connection to home.

Iheoma Nwachukwu is a fiction writer and poet who grew up in Lagos, Nigeria. He has won fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Michener Center, and the Chinua Achebe Center. His work has been published in Ploughshares, the Southern Review, the Iowa Review, AGNI, Electric Literature, Crazyhorse, and other venues. Nwachukwu is an assistant professor at Eastern University and lives in Pennsylvania.

On the list for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel is Samuel Kọ́láwọlé’s The Road to the Salt Sea (Amistad). This award is given to a debut novel of exceptional literary merit by an American author. The winner receives $10,000.

The Road to the Salt Sea centers around Able God, a Nigerian man caught in a web of violence, and zooms out into an incisive exploration of the global migration crisis. Suspenseful, sharp, and illuminating, the novel is a story of family, fate, religion, survival, the failures of the Nigerian class system, and what often happens to those who seek their fortunes elsewhere.

Samuel Kọ́láwọlé was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. He has won a Whiting Award, was a finalist for International Book Awards, and was longlisted for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize. Other honors for his writing include being a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize, and the UK’s First Novel Prize. Kọ́láwọlé teaches fiction writing full time as an Assistant Professor of English and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He also recently joined the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers as a faculty member. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania.

The winners will be announced at the 2025 Literary Awards Ceremony on May 8, 2025.

Congratulations to Nwachukwu and Kọ́láwọlé!