Olufunke Grace Bankole will officially receive the prize administered by Ploughshares, the literary journal based at Emerson College.
By Abioye Damilare Samson
The 2025 edition of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award has named Nigerian-American writer, Olufunke Grace Bankole, as this year’s winner for her debut novel, The Edge of Water (Tin House, 2025).
The annual prize, which carries a $1,500 award, recognises the best first book by a Ploughshares contributor and alternates yearly between poetry and fiction. The win adds to Bankole’s growing list of accolades, following her 2025 Westport Prize for Literature win last year for the same novel.
Olufunke Grace Bankole will officially receive the prize administered by Ploughshares, the literary journal based at Emerson College. Named in honour of John C. Zacharis, former president of Emerson College, the award continues its tradition of celebrating exceptional debut works by contributors to the journal.
Set between Nigeria and New Orleans, The Edge of Water tells the story of a young woman who dreams of life in America, as the collision of traditional prophecy and individual longing tests the bonds of a family during a devastating storm. The novel follows Amina, who, despite a divination foretelling danger in America, migrates to New Orleans filled with hope.
Just as she begins to find her way, a hurricane threatens to destroy the city, upending everything she had dreamed of. Years later, her daughter is left with questions about the mother she barely knew and the family she has yet to discover in Nigeria. Published by Tin House, the book has been widely acclaimed, receiving starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Foreword Reviews.
This year’s award was judged by Jamil Jan Kochai, author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019) and winner of the 2021 John C. Zacharis First Book Award. His selection continues the prize’s tradition of former winners returning as judges, maintaining a lineage of literary excellence within the award’s history.
The Nigerian-American writer won the first-place prize in the Glimmer Train Short-Story Award for New Writers and was the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a residency fellowship from the Anderson Center at Tower View. She has also received a Pushcart Special Mention for her writing, marking her as one of the most decorated voices in contemporary American literature.