As announced in The Common, we are delighted to introduce you to the finalists for the 2022 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing in Fiction. Established in 2015, the prize champions immigrant writers whose work straddles cultural divides and interrogates questions of identity in a global age. The winner will receive $10,000 and publication with Restless Books. This year’s judges—Tiphanie Yanique, Deepak Unnikrishnan, and Ilan Stavans— have selected the below four finalists. Read excerpts from all finalists over at The Common.
Nobody Here Plays Little Kid Games by Geimy Colón
A dark and fascinating take on the intersectionality of gender, age, and migration, Geimy Colón’s short story collection, Nobody Here Plays Little Kid Games, is a coming-of-age tale written in lush and graceful prose. Set in an unnamed Latin American country, each story begins with children innocently climbing trees, playing marbles with their friends, and experiencing their first kisses. Colón then reveals a more sinister reality as we observe the children replicate the violence of colorism, colonialism, and oppression that surrounds them. Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Colón writes stories that oscillate between the realms of innocence and the loss of innocence, refusing to shy away from the darker aspects of immigrant childhood. Nobody Here Plays Little Kid Games illustrates what occurs in the absence of adults—and what occurs because, and in spite, of them.
Between This World and the Next by Praveen Herat
Set in 1998, Between This World and the Next tells the story of Fearless, a burnt-out British photojournalist hardened by a long career in war-torn countries, and Song, a Cambodian woman who has been physically and psychologically beset by the violence in her country. When Song disappears, leaving only a mysterious videotape behind, Fearless must navigate a dangerous network of shady power brokers, transnational kingpins, sex traffickers, and arms dealers, uncovering a sprawling network of criminality and corruption in a newly post-Soviet world. A passionate exploration of power, poverty, and greed, Between This World and the Next challenges our own complicity as passive observers when exposed to a constant stream of media depicting suffering across the world. Born in London to Sri Lankan parents, Praveen Herat brings a sharp new perspective to the global ramifications of the breakup of the Soviet Union and the hidden criminal networks that impact our lives in ways beyond our reckoning.
Craft by Ananda Lima
A wild and surrealistic story collection that pays homage to Kafka and Cortázar, Ananda Lima’s Craft seeks to disrupt reductive understandings of both the immigrant experience and the art and craft of writing. Blending autofiction and magical realism, Lima creates characters as enigmatic as they are endearing. From stories of women who devour miniature Americans from vending machines and are haunted by ghosts, to the writer’s recreation of her own battles with know-it-all editors, Craft boasts a cast of characters that won’t easily be forgotten. A first-generation immigrant from Brasilia, Brazil, Lima crafts innovative work that challenges traditional North American ideas about how stories should operate, what makes an immigrant narrative, how the intellectual is placed in opposition to the emotional, and whom these ideals ultimately serve.
A Bag Full of Stones by A. Molotkov
This savvy, intelligent, and delightful detective story follows pair of investigators in Portland, Oregon—a Russian immigrant man and a Black woman—as they try to solve a series of hate-crime murders. Told in the alternating perspectives of the investigators and the ghosts of the murdered immigrant victims, this wild whodunnit set in an America tranquilized by sectarian politics brings (back) to life the voices of those who are often overlooked or dismissed. With a focus on characters struggling to reconcile their distorted worldviews with reality, A Bag Full of Stones encapsulates how confused the notion of justice has become in a nation more divided than ever. Skillfully blending different lexicons, points of view, and narrative structures, A. Molotkov, a writer born in the former USSR, showcases the multifarious, inventive possibilities of immigrant writing in the United States.
ABOUT THE FINALISTS
Geimy Colón was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and raised in Brooklyn. A writer and a teacher, she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Hunter College, the latter after nearly a decade of creating literacy development and intergenerational science-based programs in four of five NYC boroughs. She was the recipient of the MFA Hertog Research Fellowship in the fall of 2010. In 2017, her first short story publication was selected as one of the best in ten years of Kweli Journal publications and later anthologized by Asterix Journal in The Best of Kweli. She recently finished writing a collection of short stories and is currently working on her first novel. She resides in Columbus, Ohio.
Praveen Herat was born in London to Sri Lankan parents and educated in the UK, where he graduated from UEA’s Creative Writing MA. He lived and worked for several years in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, a key location in his novel, Between This World and the Next. He has worked in a variety of fields: supporting victims of domestic abuse, project-managing museum events and working with young people as an academic coach. For the last decade, he has lived in Paris.
Ananda Lima is the author of Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize, and four chapbooks. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Witness, The Common, and elsewhere. She is the inaugural WIP Latinx-in-Publishing Fellow, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers. She has served as staff at the Sewanee Writers Conference, and as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Program. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark.
A. Molotkov’s poetry collections are The Catalog of Broken Things, Application of Shadows, Synonyms for Silence and Future Symptoms. His memoir, A Broken Russia Inside Me, about growing up in the USSR and making a new life in America, is forthcoming from Propertius. He co-edits The Inflectionist Review. His collection of ten short stories, Interventions in Blood, is part of Hawaii Review Issue 91. Please visit him at AMolotkov.com
Read excerpts from all of the finalists over at The Common.
Congratulations to the finalists! And many thanks to the judges and to everyone who shared their work with us this year.