Raven Leilani is the 2020 winner of The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize for Luster (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan). De’Shawn Charles Winslow presented the award to Leilani on Thursday, December 3rd at our Annual Awards Benefit.
First awarded in 2006, the First Novel Prize 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. Stefan Merrill Block, Halle Butler, Jenny Offill, and De’Shawn Charles Winslow made up this year’s judging panel.
About Luster
Irresistibly unruly and strikingly beautiful, razor-sharp and slyly comic, sexually charged and utterly absorbing, Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make sense of her life―her hunger, her anger―in a tumultuous era. It is also a haunting, aching depiction of how hard it is to believe in your own talent, and the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves along the way.