In its third year, the Westport Prize for Literature has announced Olufunke Grace Bankole as the winner for 2025, honoring her multi-generational debut novel The Edge of Water with the prestigious $10,000 award. The award is given annually to an original work of literary fiction that is both relevant and timeless. In addition to The Edge of Water, the 2025 Westport Prize finalists were O Sinners by Nicole Cuffy and Rabbit Moon by Jennifer Haigh.

Molly Stern, founder and CEO of Zando, whose imprint Tin House published the novel, expressed her enthusiasm for the recognition. “We are thrilled that the nominating committee and judging panel have honored Grace’s skillful, mesmerizing debut novel, The Edge of Water, by naming it the winner of this year’s Westport Literary Prize,” Stern said. “This generous recognition of a work of uncompromising beauty is a true testament to Grace’s achievement, and to all that the Tin House list strives to represent with its publishing.”

This year’s competition involved a rigorous selection process, with nearly 50 volunteer readers vetting submissions before the best-reviewed manuscripts advanced to the final judging panel. The distinguished jury comprised playwright and author Tommy Greenwald, book blogger and aggregator Suzanne Leopold, publishing industry veteran Erica Melnichok, The Lifeboat author Charlotte Rogan, and nonfiction writer and former Book of the Month Club judge Nina Sankovitch.

The Edge of Water follows Amina, who moves from Nigeria to New Orleans to forge her own path. But just as Amina begins to find her way, a hurricane threatens to destroy the city, upending everything she’d dreamed of and the lives of all she holds dear. Years later, her daughter is left with questions about the mother she barely knew, and the family she has yet to discover in Nigeria.

Bankole, a Nigerian American writer currently living in Portland, Oregon, is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a recipient of a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship. Her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review, and Stand Magazine. She won the first-place prize in the Glimmer Train Short-Story Award for New Writers and was the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, a residency-fellowship from the Anderson Center at Tower View, and has received a Pushcart Special Mention for her writing.

The winning novel centers on Amina’s journey from Nigeria to New Orleans, where a devastating hurricane destroys her newfound life and dreams. The story spans generations as her daughter later searches for answers about her lost mother and unknown Nigerian family. Critics have celebrated the work, with Kirkus Reviews calling it a “global, multigenerational novel suffused with heart, feeling, devastation, and hope.” Maurice Carlos Ruffin, author of The American Daughters, described it as “a beautifully realized epic tale following the lives of three generations of women across two continents. Bankole expertly explores tenderness and heartache without sentimentality. This is a stunning addition to the canon of diasporic tales.”

Previous winners of the Westport Prize for Literature include renowned novelist Zadie Smith for The Fraud in 2023, named as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Independent, and Alejandro Puyana for Freedom is a Feast in 2024.

Bankole will be honored at The Westport Library on Thursday, November 6, at 7 pm, where she will be awarded the prize in a ceremony held in the Trefz Forum and take part in a special conversation with The Yale Review editor Meghan O’Rourke. There will be copies of The Edge of Water available for purchase at the event, with Bankole signing afterward.

Congratulations to Olufunke Grace Bankole!