World Literary Awards

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Edition 32 (2017)

FictionNonfictionPoetryDrama

Winners

10 people
Clare Barron Winner

A darkly comic play about a woman caring for her ill father while trying to reckon with her own emptiness and loneliness.

Fantasy and reality blur as the play examines care, intimacy, and survival.

104 pages
familyillnessintimacydark comedy
Clarence Coo Winner

A play in which language, desire, class, and love collide, exposing the instability of family and intimacy.

Play with language and emotional pressure give family scenes a sharp outline.

133 pages
languagedesireclasslove
James Ijames Winner

A play about an artist who hires a woman to perform a persona, exposing distortions in representation and power.

Transactions around race, gender, and art unravel with both humor and unease.

71 pages
racegenderartperformance
Jen Beagin Winner

A debut novel that tracks cleaning work, addiction, and a shifting self-image with strange lightness and humor.

A chaotic life is rendered with dry humor and warm observation.

240 pages
addictionself-acceptanceclassdark humor

A novel that uses a research institute and one family to expose questions of race, language, and assimilation.

An experiment involving a chimpanzee lays bare the wounds inside a family.

326 pages
racefamilycommunicationscience
Lisa Halliday Winner

A novel built around an uneven love affair and an airport detention, tracing power imbalances across two very different settings.

A two-part structure shifts between intimacy and state power.

288 pages
powerintimacyidentitystructure

A novel about Stanford graduates whose friendships and ambitions reveal the anxieties and absurdities of millennial life.

Love, work, and class consciousness unwind in the conversations of young urban adults.

384 pages
millennialsfriendshipambitiontechnology

A nonfiction book that uses experience in the Border Patrol to examine violence and ethics on both sides of the border.

The work of guarding a border eventually brings the border inside the self.

288 pages
bordermemoirmigrationviolence
Simone White Winner

A poetry collection that folds in dispersion, Blackness, code-switching, and a feminist eye while unsettling poetic form.

A voice that is sharp, layered, and often unpredictable tries to re-stitch a dispersed world.

75 pages
poetrydisplacementblacknessfeminism

A poetry collection that confronts desire, violence, racism, and homophobia with urban pressure and force.

Polyphonic poems blur the line between harming and being harmed.

82 pages
poetrydesireracismhomophobia