Congratulations to First Pages Prize Winners. Visit the website to see learn more about these winning writers!
2022 First Pages Prize Shortlist & Longlist
32 submissions were selected for the Longlist, of which 12 reached the Shortlist. Click on the links to learn more about them – congratulations to all!
2022 1st Place – Elise Thi TranDredged From the Courtyard PondDredged From the Courtyard Pond is a collection of vignettes drawing from the oral history of a family’s escape from Vietnam and memoir of a daughter born almost twenty years later.
2022 2nd Place – Greg TebbanoIf She Doesn’t Exist, Why Do I Miss Her?
After a young couple lose their unborn child in an auto accident, the truth of the child’s paternity comes to light and what was to be the family home becomes the stage for a love triangle convened within a cage.
2022 3rd Place – Lauren AlwanAfter the Levantines
After the Levantines centers on Sofia, matriarch of the Almasis, whose history of dislocation and loss spans Istanbul as a new republic and immigration to pre-WW2 Brooklyn. When the family settles in 1950s Los Angeles, Sofia finds stability, until late in life when she’s faced with losing the home she loves.
2022 4th Place – Leila C. NadirAfghan Americana
Afghan Americana is an intimate-geopolitical memoir that chronicles Leila Nadir’s coming-of-age as a mixed-race girl in an immigrant family haunted by colonial violences and unspoken traumas. The book excavates the messy networks of military, industrial, emotional, spiritual, racial, colonial, and ancestral legacies that dump so much debris on our burgeoning identities, imprinting secrets and denial in our bodies.
2022 5th Place – Kaushika SureshGossip
Upon arriving at prestigious Briarswood College, Jayashri, a first generation Indian-American student, finds herself involved with The Eight, the school’s infamous secret society. Gossip is a novel about girls, and all the secrets they hold. What is gossip but the first form of fiction?
