Nigerian American writer Olufunke Grace Bankole has been named the winner of the 2026 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, the prize’s twenty-fifth, for her debut novel The Edge of Water, published by Tin House in February 2025. The announcement was made on July 1, 2026. The award, administered by Virginia Commonwealth University and now in its quarter-century, honours an outstanding debut novel published during the preceding calendar year. Bankole was selected from more than 200 submissions, emerging through a multi-stage judging process that involved volunteer readers, Richmond community members, students in the VCU MFA in Creative Writing program, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Committee, with last year’s winner, Anne de Marcken, serving as a final judge. She beat out finalists Karissa Chen, author of Homeseeking (G.P. Putnam’s Sons), and Ethan Rutherford, author of North Sun, or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther (A Strange Object/Deep Vellum).

Set between Nigeria and New Orleans, The Edge of Water follows three generations of Nigerian women as prophecy, intergenerational bonds, and immigration intersect in the years surrounding Hurricane Katrina. Told partly through letters exchanged between a mother and daughter, and through the language of Ifa cowrie-shell divination, the novel explores the detangling of Yoruba Christianity and traditional religion, the love between a determined mother and a dreaming daughter who do not say enough to each other until it is too late, and the quiet, devastating courage at the heart of the immigrant experience. It is a book deeply rooted in Yoruba spiritual life and the specific textures of the Nigerian diaspora in America.

The novel arrived in February 2025 already carrying considerable momentum. TIME named it one of its 100 Must-Read Books of 2025. It was a Best Book of the Year at Apple Books, Electric Literature, the Chicago Review of Books, Well-Read Black Girl, and Goodreads, and a Best Book of the Month at Oprah Daily, Ms. Magazine, and Book Riot. It had already won the Westport Prize for Literature and the Ploughshares John C. Zacharis First Book Award before the Cabell announcement, and was longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and named a finalist for the New American Voices Award, the CLMP Firecracker Awards, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and the Oregon Book Award. The Cabell First Novelist Award is, as Bankole herself noted, the third major win for the book.

Bankole announced the win on Instagram in a statement that moved between gratitude and the feeling of a long-deferred arrival.

“I’m incredibly proud to announce that my novel, The Edge of Water, is the WINNER of the 2026 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award!”

she wrote.

“Having navigated nearly 20 years of creative ups and downs to arrive at the publication of my debut novel, it means the world to be recognised with an award that honours the excellence and imagination of the work as well as the journey of the first-time novelist. And to enter the lineage of such accomplished winners…wow.”

She went on to thank the community of readers, the sponsoring bodies, the VCU MFA program and its students, and the final judging committee, before adding:

“Congratulations to all of the 2026 nominated authors. My gratitude to the Tin House team. I cannot wait to meet and celebrate with the VCU and Richmond community at the award ceremony on November 12! The Cabell First Novelist marks the third award win for The Edge of Water and I am beyond grateful. What a season!”

Twenty years is a long time to carry a book inside you. The fact that The Edge of Water arrived fully formed, widely celebrated, and now decorated with the kind of awards that make booksellers and readers pay attention, says a lot about what patience and commitment to craft can produce. Bankole will receive the award at a public event at Virginia Commonwealth University on November 12. Congratulations, Bankole!