Ploughshares has announced Olufunke Grace Bankole as the winner of the 2025 John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her 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. Named in honour of John C. Zacharis, former president of Emerson College, the award alternates yearly between poetry and fiction. It is administered by Ploughshares, the literary journal based at Emerson College.
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.
In Ibadan, Nigeria, a mother receives a divination that foretells danger for her daughter in America. Despite this warning, she allows her to forge her own path, and Amina arrives in New Orleans filled with hope. However, just as Amina begins to find her way, a hurricane threatens to destroy the city, upending everything she had dreamed of and the lives of all she holds dear. Years later, her daughter is left with questions about the mother she barely knew, and the family she has yet to discover in Nigeria.
Exploring the love of a determined mother and dreaming daughter who do not say enough to each other until it is too late, the detangling of Yoruba Christianity, traditional religion, and folklore, and the tellings of three generations of daring women―through times of longing, promise, and romance, as well as heartbreak―Olufunke Grace Bankole’s The Edge of Water is a luminous debut novel about a young woman brave enough to leave all she knows behind, and the way her fate transforms a family destined to stay together.
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.
Olufunke Grace Bankole is a Nigerian American writer. A graduate of Harvard Law School and a recipient of a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship, her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review, and Stand Magazine. She 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.
Congratulations, Olufunke Grace Bankole!
