2024 Whiting Awards Announces 10 Winners of $50,000 Prizes

Aaliyah Bilal, Taylor Johnson and 8 other early career authors will be taking home the prize money

Ten emerging authors are taking home $50,000 after winning big at the Whiting Awards this week.

The annual ceremony, which is in its 39th year, aims to give writers a chance to work on their writing full time "or to take bold new risks in their work," as it recognizes "excellence and promise" in the field, according to a release. And this year is no exception.

The 2024 Whiting Awards — which will been given to those in fiction, drama, poetry and nonfiction and takes place on April 11 at McNally Jackson Seaport — includes winners from United States and beyond. This year, four winners in particular hail from Korea, India, El Salvador and Botswana.

“This year’s winners have made liminal space their own — that place of potential that exists between states, whether those are genres, languages, countries or definitions of self,” Courtney Hodell, Whiting’s director of literary programs, said in a statement.

“The rigor and fluid beauty of their writing make us excited for the work to come.”

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Among this year's winners in fiction is Temple Folk author Aaliyah Bilal, who through her short story collection “invites readers into a world whose complexity has been often overlooked, informing her explorations with a prickling specificity and psychological insight," the organization shared.

Yoon Choi, author of Skinship, also took home an award for fiction, and the Whiting Foundation writes that the work's “supple prose propels the reader through these unhurried, layered stories of the Korean diaspora, exploring the bonds and rifts between generations and the weight of secrets." Call and Response author Gothataone Moeng and The Sorrows of Others writer Ada Zhang, whose work shares "graceful, crystalline stories" also won the award for their fiction releases.

Call and Response is described by Whiting as “nine big-hearted, capacious stories, rooted in the villages and cities of Botswana" that "examine all that blooms and breaks in the bonds, desires and ambitions of women."

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This year's nonfiction winner is Javier Zamora, recognized for his memoir Solito, in which he details his migration from El Salvador to the United States as a child. The foundation notes his work “tunnel[s] deeply into the experience of crossing the border as a solitary child, and then widen[s] to consider those who leave and those who stay, the rent in the fabric of family and how it might be mended.”

In the poetry category, Zamora also has been announced as a winner for his collection Unaccompanied. The rest of the poetry winners include Elisa Gonzalez for her work The Iliad in which she eulogizes her late brother. Taylor Johnson's Inheritance — which focuses on "desire, a hunger for fresh language and forms”— also will take home a Whiting Award for poetry. As did Charif Shanahan's Trace Evidence, which the foundation notes "sets out to discover how a person should live."

Finally, drama winners this year include Shayok Misha Chowdhury, author and director of Public Obscenities, and Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, author of the trilogy The China Plays.

Public Obscenities explores "the borders of language, sexuality, the public self and the hidden life," while Cowhig's award-winning work brings "the histories of nations, of capital and of censorship to life.”

The Whiting Awards were established by the foundation in 1985, and has awarded a total of $10 million to 390 creatives to date.

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