The DAG Foundation has announced that Zimbabwean author Yvette Lisa Ndlovu is one of five finalists for its inaugural DAG Prize for Literature!

The DAG Prize seeks to “contribute meaningfully to the evolution of American prose literature,” supporting writers who have published one book but whose work has not yet received major literary recognition. Finalists were selected for their creative vision, innovation in form or genre, and potential for shaping the future of American literary discourse.

Ndlovu, who describes herself as a sarungano—a Shona term for storyteller—is the author of the acclaimed short story collection Drinking from Graveyard Wells. The collection has garnered significant attention, winning the Cornell University 2023 Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing and earning shortlist nods for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Collection.

She earned her B.A. from Cornell University and an M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Currently, she serves as the Newhouse Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Wellesley College and is the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Fellowship for Black writers.

Ndlovu’s forthcoming project, Godsflower, is an Afrosurrealist postcolonial fable set in the imagined nation of New Zimbabwe—a country haunted by the ghost of its resurrected dictator. The novel draws on the narrative structure of ngano, a Zimbabwean tradition of fabulist storytelling, to explore the absurdities of life under authoritarianism while envisioning a world in which such regimes collapse.

The other finalists are Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya, Mairead Small Staid, Eric Dean Wilson, and Michael Zapata.

The winner of the DAG Prize will be announced in July. The $20,000 monetary reward may be used for a range of professional development activities, including research, writing, editing, residencies, and workshops in support of the author’s second project.

Congratulations to Yvette Lisa Ndlovu!