Darrell Kinsey Wins the 2025 First Novel Prize for Natch
Congratulations to Darrell Kinsey, author of Natch (University of Iowa Press), on receiving The Center for Fiction 2025 First Novel Prize! The award was announced at The Center for Fiction Annual Awards Benefit at Cipriani 25 Broadway. Joseph Earl Thomas, author of the 2024 First Novel Prize-winning novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, presented Kinsey with the award, which carries with it a prize of $15,000.
Natch was selected by a panel of distinguished judges: Xochitl Gonzalez, Adam Haslett, Tracy O’Neill, and Joseph Earl Thomas. The 2025 First Novel Prize shortlist also included We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown (Macmillan / Henry Holt and Co.); The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne (Hachette Book Group / Little, Brown and Company); Ibis by Justin Haynes (Abrams / The Overlook Press); Loca by Alejandro Heredia (Simon & Schuster); Liquid by Mariam Rahmani (Hachette Book Group / Algonquin Books); and Optional Practical Training by Shubha Sunder (Graywolf Press). The shortlisted authors each received $1,000.
Kinsey is the 20th recipient of the First Novel Prize, joining an esteemed group that includes Marisha Pessl, Junot Díaz, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tommy Orange, Raven Leilani, and De’Shawn Charles Winslow. For two decades, the Prize has helped bring extraordinary new voices to wider attention, recognizing work that reshapes and enriches contemporary literature. By championing debut authors and connecting readers to bold new storytelling, we help to ensure a vibrant, diverse, and enduring future for fiction.
The honorees at the Awards Benefit also included author Haruki Murakami, who received The Center for Fiction Lifetime of Excellence in Fiction Award. He was introduced by musician, author, and artist Patti Smith, who performed alongside Jesse Paris Smith. The Medal for Editorial Excellence was awarded to Kate Medina, the legendary editor, Executive Vice President, associate publisher, and executive editorial director at Random House. She was introduced by author Anna Quindlen. The evening was emceed by actor André Holland.
The Annual Awards Benefit raises funds critical to advancing our mission as a nonprofit: to support readers and writers of all ages and histories, and to build community through fiction. We bring this mission to life at The Center for Fiction every day: providing access to books, supporting emerging writers, introducing children to contemporary books and authors through our KidsRead program, and engaging diverse readers of all ages through our educational and public programs. We are deeply grateful to everyone who has joined in this effort.
To help create a vibrant future for fiction, we invite you to make a gift to The Center for Fiction this winter.
2025 First Novel Prize
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Natch
By Darrell Kinsey
Published by University of Iowa Press
At the age of twenty-nine, tired of trying to get along with members of his crew and tired of the money going into somebody else’s pocket, Natch begins working for himself, climbing and cutting down trees in the foothills of north Georgia. He has his truck, ropes, climbing gear, and a rotating selection of secondhand saws he finds at pawn shops and flea markets. He is free to work as he pleases. And he believes he is fine with his life as it is, living alone in an old hunting cabin at the end of a dirt lane, enjoying his habits, exploring his vices, and living, as he puts it, “like some wild thing let loose on the world.”
Then he meets Asha, an alluring woman who works the nightshift at a convenience store. He finds himself needing her in a way that he has never needed anyone before. Among her charms are her passions for reading and belly dance and her ambition to put herself through school to become a therapist. She believes her studies will cure her of the familial dysfunctions she faced as a child and eventually enable her to help others.
When Asha discovers that she is expecting a child, the young couple struggles to convert the excitement of their early days together into a more steadfast companionship. Over the seasons of her pregnancy, Asha discovers that the freedom of their hardscrabble existence is overshadowed by the constant threat of misfortune and injury, and she finds herself timorous to bring a child into a setting where chainsaws are everywhere, where constant fires burn the bones of felled trees, a world of endless struggle in which finding more work means finding more danger.
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Darrell Kinsey
Darrell Kinsey
Darrell Kinsey has published short fiction in Noon and he won a Pushcart Prize for Fiction XLV. He lives in Watkinsville, Georgia.
Photo Credit: Darrell Kinsey
