Judges

2024 FICTION/CNF JUDGE - EDWIDGE DANTICAT

Edwidge Danticat is the author of seventeen books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; the novels-in-stories, The Dew Breaker, Claire of the Sea Light, and The Art of Death, a National Book Critics Circle finalist for Criticism. She has written seven books for children and young adults, a travel narrative, After the Dance, and a collection of essays, Create Dangerously.

Her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Diaspora in the United States, The Beacon Best of 2000, Haiti Noir, Haiti Noir 2, and Best American Essays 2011. 

She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow, a 2018 Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow, a 2018 winner of the Neustadt Prize, a 2019 winner of the Saint Louis Literary Award, a 2020 United States Artist Fellow, a 2020 winner of the Vilceck Prize, and a 2023 winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.

Her story collection, Everything Inside, was a 2020 winner of the Bocas Fiction Prize, The Story Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Prize. Her essay collection We’re Alone is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in Fall 2024.

Edwidge is the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.

2023 FICTION JUDGE - TASH AW

Tash Aw is the author of four critically-acclaimed novels, including, most recently, We, the Survivors, as well as a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, Strangers on a Pier. His writing has won numerous honours, including the Whitbread Prize, Commonwealth Prize and an O. Henry Award, as well as being twice longlisted for the MAN Booker Prize. His novels have been translated into twenty-three languages. A regular contributor to the New York Times, the Guardian and the New York Review of Books, his work has also appeared in the London Review of Books, Le Magazine Littéraire, A Public Space and the landmark Granta 100, among many others.

2023 CNF JUDGE - PATRICIA HAMPL

With her books, A Romantic Education, Virgin Time and Blue Arabesque, Patricia Hampl helped define what Booklist has called “the memoir of discovery.” In addition, Hampl has made contributions as an editor and contributor to works defining and extending the understanding of autobiographical writing including We Shall Bear Witness: Life Narratives and Human Rights. Several her books have been named “Notable Books” of the year by The New York Times Book Review and her fiction, poems, reviews, essays and travel pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Granta, The American Scholar, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. She is a MacArthur recipient and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts (twice, in poetry and prose), Ingram Merrill Foundation and Djerassi Foundation. Patricia Hampl is Regents Professor and McKnight Distinguished Professor at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, a member of the permanent faculty of the Prague Summer Writers Program and Visiting Professor in the Centre for Life Narratives affiliated with Kingston University-London.

 2022 JUDGE - JUSTIN TORRES

Justin Torres has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, Glimmer Train, Flaunt, and other publications, as well as non-fiction pieces in publications like The Guardian and The Advocate. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop where he was the Truman Capote Literary Trust fellow, Justin's novel We the Animals has been translated into fifteen languages and was recently adapted into a film. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for five Independent Spirit Awards. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. The National Book Foundation named him one of the 2012's 5 under 35. He was the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is an Assistant Professor of English at UCLA.

2021 JUDGE - LAN SAMANTHA CHANG

Lan Samantha Chang is the Elizabeth M. Stanley Professor in the Arts at the University of Iowa and the Director of leading American MFA program, the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is known not only for her writing, but her generous, insightful mentoring and teaching in the US and internationally.

She is the author of a collection of short fiction, Hunger and the novels, Inheritance, and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Her third novel, The Family Chao, will be released in 2022. Chang’s work has been chosen twice for The Best American Short Stories. She has received creative writing fellowships from Stanford University, Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and others.

2020 JUDGE - SEBASTIAN FAULKS

Sebastian Faulks is the award-winning author of at least 20 books, including the French trilogy (Birdsong, Charlotte Gray, The Girl at the Lion d’Or), and the books Where My Heart Used to Beat, Paris Echo and Snow Country. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1993. In 2011 Faulks presented a four-part BBC series called Faulks on Fiction, looking at the British novel and its characters and wrote a series tie-in book of the same name.

The Literary Review has said that "Faulks has the rare gift of being popular and literary at the same time" and The Sunday Telegraph called him "One of the most impressive novelists of his generation.  Faulks's 2005 novel, Human Traces has been described as "A masterpiece, one of the great novels of this or any other century." 

2019 JUDGE - PAUL MCVEIGH

Born in Belfast, Paul McVeigh began his career as a playwright before moving to London where he wrote comedy shows. Moving into prose, his short stories have been published in anthologies, newspapers and literary journals and read on BBC Radio 3, 4 & 5. ‘Hollow’ was shortlisted for Irish Short Story of the Year at the Irish Book Awards in 2017. The Good Son, Paul’s debut novel, won The Polari First Novel Prize and The McCrea Literary Award. It was shortlisted for The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, the Prix du Roman Cezam in France and was a finalist for The People’s Book Prize. Paul has taught creative writing and read his work, in Australia, Austria, Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Singapore, Switzerland and Turkey. He is currently acting Head of Literature for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

2018 JUDGE - ADNAN MAHMUTOVIĆ

Adnan Mahmutović has a PhD in English Literature from Stockholm University and MFA in Creative Writing, City University of Hong Kong. He has lectured at the Department of English, Stockholm University, since 2007 and acted as the fiction editor at Two Thirds North, a journal of transnational writing, since 2010. His major academic work includes: Ways of Being Free (Rodopi, 2012), Craft of Editing (Routlege, 2018), Future in Comics (MacFarland 2017), and Claiming Space (Bloomsbury 2021). His major creative works includes: Thinner than a Hair (Cinnamon Press 2010), How to Fare Well and Stay Fair (Salt Publishing 2012), At the Feet of Mothers (Cinnamon Press 2020). He is a recipient of many awards for fiction and has served a judge on a number of literary prizes, including Neustadt Prize for Literature.