These Are The Finalists For The $35,000 Aspen Words Literary Prize

The Aspen Words Literary Prize is in its third year of awarding $35,000 to fiction that "illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture." These are the five most outstanding contenders for the 2020 prize, as described by the jury members below.

The winner will be announced on April 16.

"The timing of Brian Allen Carr’s exquisite novel Opioid, Indiana is not a surprise. What is surprising is the redemption we feel in reading it. Opioid, Indiana, a fictitious town, is struggling for relevance and is decimated by addiction. We observe the activity of the residents through the acute observations of Riggle, a discarded, uneducated teen. Over the course of one week, we find the town and our protagonist are familiar, funny, and lovable lost souls. Carr’s novel raises our empathy for all the young adults living on the street and gives us hope that they, like Riggle, will somehow transcend and survive." —Helen Obermeyer

"Patsy is a novel about an undocumented immigrant’s yearning to build a new life in the United States while connected by family and culture to Jamaica. Beneath the surface, it is a deeply affecting reflection on motherhood and the price women pay to define their own choices, desires, and purpose in life. Dennis-Benn’s exquisite dialogue makes you want to read out loud, hearing its rhythm and tone, and her vividly drawn settings make it easy to enter Patsy’s world. Patsy is a novel as determined, honest, and necessary as its protagonist." —Amy Garmer

"With the first sentence, 'I am afraid of my wife’s eyes,' we enter a world too visible for the protagonists who can’t, nevertheless, turn away. How do human beings process the horror around them, the senseless violence, the loss of what we hold dearest? Is it possible to ever feel safe, to love, to appreciate beauty? Christy Lefteri asks these questions of her characters and, ultimately, of us. We see wars on our screens and cross paths with the survivors in new lives in our neighborhoods, but we don’t see them. Lefteri brings us closer so we can, without fear." —Esmeralda Santiago

"Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli is informed, to powerful effect, by the author’s ongoing commitment to meditating on the seemingly infinite predicaments America’s immigration and refugee policy has brought to the fore. What I found so special about this book, though, was the unexpected route and experimental form the author uses to work through what all of this means for children and the very concept of 'family.'" —Saeed Jones

"Few writers have done for their city what Washington has done for Houston, which is to say, to articulate how a new generation of citizens are living, loving and struggling there with both the legacies of their shared past and the new possibilities of the present. But in writing an interconnected short story collection about it, he has also mapped how climate change, income inequality, homophobia, anti-blackness, and anti-immigrant fervor are shaping our present, in what becomes a 21st-century picaresque, by the end— almost, even, an oracle." —Alexander Chee