Nigerian-American writer Olufunke Grace Bankole has been named the 2026 winner of the VCU First Novelist Award for her book The Edge of Water.
The award, now in its 25th year, recognizes an outstanding debut novel published during the preceding calendar year.
She was selected from more than 200 submissions and emerged as the winner after a multi-stage judging process involving volunteer readers, members of the Richmond community, students in the Virginia Commonwealth University MFA in Creative Writing program, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Committee.
She was chosen from a final shortlist of three alongside Karissa Chen, author of Homeseeking, and Ethan Rutherford, author of North Sun, or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther.
Published by Tin House, The Edge of Water is set between Nigeria and New Orleans and follows three generations of Nigerian women. The novel explores family, migration, religion, Yoruba spirituality, prophecy, identity, and the bonds between mothers and daughters. It centers on Amina, a young Nigerian woman who moves to New Orleans despite a prophecy warning of danger, only for a devastating hurricane to change the course of her family’s life.
A graduate of Harvard Law School, Olufunke Grace Bankole has previously won the Glimmer Train Short-Story Award for New Writers and has been recognized with an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, an Anderson Center residency-fellowship, and a Pushcart Special Mention.
Congratulations, Olufunke Grace Bankole!
