The winner of the 2015 GrubStreet Book Prize in Fiction, which carries a $5,000 cash award, is Josh Weil of Nevada City, CA for The Great Glass Sea, published by Grove Atlantic. Author Sigrid Nunez was the head juror.
In her citation, Sigrid Nunez wrote: “It’s not often that one can say truthfully about a book that it is not like any other book. But that is precisely what readers of Josh Weil’s radiantly written, profoundly original first novel will find themselves saying. Intricately composed and thrillingly audacious,The Great Glass Sea is a tender story of fraternal love and a visionary imagining of Russian society—a work whose scope enlarges to explore important questions about family, politics, labor, freedom, ambition, and storytelling…Once the excitement of having read [this] book has died down, the question naturally occurs: What will this brilliant young writer do next?” Read the full citation here: https://www.grubstreet.org/programs/national-book-prize/
Nunez also named two Finalists: Megan Mayhew Bergman for Almost Famous Women (Scribner) and Jess Row for Your Face in Mine (Riverhead). Congratulations to these wonderful writers.
Josh Weil is also the author of The New Valley, a volume of novellas, winner of the 2010 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from The American Academy of Arts & Letters. Weil’s other fiction has appeared in Granta, Esquire, Tin House and One Story, and he has written non-fiction for The New York Times, The Sun, Poets & Writers and Time.com. Born in the Appalachian mountains of Southwest Virginia, he currently lives with his family in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, where he is at work on a collection of stories.
Josh will be giving a public reading at the Book Prize Reception on Friday, May 1st, at the Park Plaza Hotel, open to the public.
As part of the prize, Josh will be a guest author at the Muse and the Marketplace conference, May 1-3, 2015. The Great Glass Sea is the All-Conference Read, and Josh will lead a book club discussion on its construction on Saturday, May 2nd. He will lead a craft talk on Sunday, May 3rd, entitled “Far From Your Own Shores.”
