Reading List · Emerging writers
The Whiting Awards are given each year by the Whiting Foundation to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama. They have been presented since 1985, and each winner currently receives $50,000. Writers cannot apply: candidates are nominated through a juried process and the winners are chosen by a committee of writers, scholars and editors. Past winners include Colson Whitehead, Ocean Vuong, Tony Kushner, Alice McDermott and Ling Ma.
By Lisanne Swart · 38 fiction winners, 2016–2026 · $50,000 each · All literary prizes · Last reviewed 28 October 2026
Click a title to read about it further down ↓
Quick answer
The Whiting Awards are annual prizes of $50,000 each, given by the Whiting Foundation since 1985 to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama. The 2026 fiction winners are Elaine Castillo, Hilary Leichter and Lara Mimosa Montes.
How this page chooses
The timeline at the top lists every recipient for Fiction, all 38 of them. The latest fifteen have their own entry further down, oldest first; the titles in the timeline that you can click are those.
Under each writer is a line of plain fact about the book or its author, and nothing that cannot be checked.
Oldest first. The line in red is a fact about the book or its author, not an opinion about it.
The shop links on this page go straight to the shop. They are not affiliate links and I earn nothing if you buy.
Sidik Fofana’s 2022 debut follows residents of Banneker Terrace, a low-income high-rise in Harlem, as gentrification closes in on the neighbourhood. Each story is told in the voice of a different tenant.
Fofana was a 2018 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow.
Carribean Fragoza’s 2021 collection, published by City Lights, mixes gothic horror and magical realism with the everyday lives of Latinx characters in Southern California. Fragoza comes from South El Monte, California.
A finalist for a 2022 PEN Award.
R. Kikuo Johnson’s 2022 graphic novella is told in dreamlike vignettes about a family coping with a loss during a period of transition. Johnson is a cartoonist and illustrator whose debut was the graphic novel Night Fisher.
Won the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Aaliyah Bilal’s debut collection contains ten stories set among Black Muslims, across decades, generations and continents. Its characters face questions of faith, family, desire and identity, from an HVAC technician at a mosque gathering to a woman corresponding with a suitor online.
Shortlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction.
Yoon Choi’s debut collection follows Korean immigrant families and their children. The stories look at relationships between generations, emotional distance within families and the weight of secrets kept from one another.
Won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and a California Book Awards gold medal.
Gothataone Moeng’s debut collection contains nine stories set in the villages and cities of Botswana. They focus on the bonds, desires and ambitions of women, including widows, sparring sisters and girls testing the limits of their world.
Moeng is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
Ada Zhang’s first story collection, published by A Public Space Books, follows outsiders and misfits in Chinese and Chinese American life who live with the lasting effects of the Cultural Revolution, loneliness and alienation.
Zhang was a 2023 National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree.
Elwin Cotman’s story collection, published by Scribner, uses magical elements and pop-culture references to examine America’s history of racism. Its characters include a boy facing racial abuse on a 1950s highway and a father confronting his son in the late 1990s.
Cotman’s debut novel, The Age of Ignorance, is forthcoming from Scribner.
Emil Ferris’s graphic novel follows Karen Reyes, a ten-year-old in 1968 Chicago who loves monsters and art. When her upstairs neighbour, the Holocaust survivor Anka Silverberg, dies, Karen suspects murder and begins her own investigation.
Won three 2018 Eisner Awards, including Best Writer/Artist.
Samuel Kọ́láwọlé’s debut novel follows Able God, a young Nigerian man caught up in the pull of migration towards Europe. Along the way he gives up his principles one by one in order to survive.
Longlisted for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize.
Claire Luchette’s debut novel follows a small group of Catholic nuns who run a halfway house in a Rhode Island town that does not especially want them. It centres on overlooked people and believers working through doubt.
Luchette is a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree.
Shubha Sunder’s debut novel, published by Graywolf Press, follows Pavitra, a young immigrant woman in the United States who is trying to become an artist and work out who she is amid other people’s expectations.
Her story collection Boomtown Girl won the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award.
Elaine Castillo’s 2018 debut follows an extended Filipino family in Milpitas, California. When Hero, a niece with a political past she keeps to herself, arrives from the Philippines, her aunt Paz and uncle Pol take her in.
Her second novel, Moderation, was longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Hilary Leichter’s 2020 debut follows an unnamed temp worker who moves between short-term jobs in the hope of permanent work, which she calls “the steadiness”. One assignment sends her to sea to stand in for a crew member.
A finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
Lara Mimosa Montes’s first-person prose narrative, published by Wendy’s Subway in 2025, follows a narrator who quits a bookshop job and withdraws from a world saturated with language, trying to recover the power of words to imagine other worlds.
Montes has also published two poetry collections, including THRESHOLES (2020).
The Whiting Awards recognise emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama. Writers cannot apply, and the Whiting Foundation does not accept unsolicited nominations. Nominees are put forward through a juried process, and a committee of writers, scholars and editors, selected each year by the Foundation, chooses the ten winners.
Each winner receives $50,000, which the Foundation describes as a chance to devote themselves full time to their own writing. The awards are announced each spring at an evening ceremony; the 2025 winners were announced on 9 April 2025 and the 2026 winners on 15 April 2026.
Since 2016, between two and five of the ten annual awards have gone to fiction writers. The category covers novels, short stories and graphic narratives: the cartoonists R. Kikuo Johnson (2023) and Emil Ferris (2025) both won in fiction. Some winners are honoured before a first novel appears, as with Elwin Cotman, whose debut novel is forthcoming.
Several fiction winners have gone on to wider recognition. Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance had already been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award when he won in 2019, and Aaliyah Bilal’s Temple Folk was shortlisted for the 2023 National Book Award. Earlier Whiting winners include Colson Whitehead, David Foster Wallace, Lydia Davis and Jonathan Franzen.
Annual prizes of $50,000 given by the Whiting Foundation to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama. They have been presented since 1985.
Elaine Castillo, Hilary Leichter and Lara Mimosa Montes. The winners were announced on 15 April 2026.
Elwin Cotman, Emil Ferris, Samuel Kọ́láwọlé, Claire Luchette and Shubha Sunder.
Each winner receives $50,000.
No. The Foundation does not accept applications or unsolicited nominations; nominees are chosen through a juried process.
In 1985.
Past winners include Colson Whitehead, David Foster Wallace, Lydia Davis, Jonathan Franzen, Tracy K. Smith, Tony Kushner, Alice McDermott, Ocean Vuong and Ling Ma.
It varies. Between 2016 and 2026 the number of fiction winners ranged from two (2021) to five (2025) out of ten.
Recipient list last verified 28 October 2026.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendationsThe Night Owl Book Finder
