Two writers of African origin are among the ten finalists for the 2026 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, one of the most respected prizes for debut fiction in the United States. Olufunke Grace Bankole and Stephanie Wambugu join eight other finalists selected from nearly 200 submissions for a prize that has been honoring outstanding debut novels since its founding in 2002 at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia.

Named after the James Branch Cabell Library at VCU, the award draws on an unusually rigorous and community-rooted selection process: volunteer readers, MFA students from VCU’s Department of English, and a final judging panel work together to narrow the field before a winner is named. Now in its third decade, the prize has established itself as a meaningful marker of debut fiction worth paying attention to.

Bankole’s The Edge of Water, published by Tin House, is set between Nigeria and New Orleans and follows a young woman whose dream of life in America collides with traditional prophecy and the bonds of family during a devastating storm. It is a novel about diaspora and longing, about what we carry across oceans and what the water takes from us, and it arrives with the grace of a writer fully in command of her material. Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds, published by Little, Brown & Company, is set in the glamorous and brutal early-1990s New York art world, where two outsiders bound by a volatile friendship and scarred childhoods discover that the world only has room for one of them. Described as Luster meets The Idiot, it is the debut of a writer who understands how race, ambition, and belonging operate inside the machinery of culture.

The other eight finalists are Homeseeking by Karissa Chen, The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne, Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin, A Thousand Natural Shocks by Omar Hussain, Wanting by Claire Jia, To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage, Endling by Maria Reva, and North Sun, or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther by Ethan Rutherford. The winner will be selected by a final judging panel. Congratulations to Olufunke Grace Bankole and Stephanie Wambugu!

Read the full announcement at library.vcu.edu.