The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, first awarded in 2006, recognizes the year’s best debut novel as selected by a panel of distinguished American writers and carries with it an award of $15,000. This year’s judges are Matt Bell, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Megha Majumdar, Rebecca Makkai, and Chigozie Obioma.
The First Novel Prize Shortlist
Brown Girls
Daphne Palasi Andreades
(Penguin Random House / Random House)
The School for Good Mothers
Jessamine Chan
(Simon & Schuster)
NSFW
Isabel Kaplan
(Macmillan / Henry Holt and Company)
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English
Noor Naga
(Graywolf Press)
Little Rabbit
Alyssa Songsiridej
(Bloomsbury Publishing)
Big Girl
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
(W. W. Norton & Company / Liveright)
The Immortal King Rao
Vauhini Vara
(W. W. Norton & Company)
Rebecca Makkai
Presenting the 2022 First Novel Prize
Rebecca Makkai’s last novel, The Great Believers, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, the Clark Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize; and it was one of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of 2018. Her other books are the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime—four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada University and Northwestern University, and is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. Her new novel, I Have Some Questions for You, is forthcoming in February, 2023.