Winners

2024 Winner

Twenty Third Annual Award
In Memoriam (Penguin Random House) 
By Alice Winn

ABOUT IN MEMORIAM FROM THE PUBLISHERS WEBSITE

GMA BUZZ PICK 

INTERNATIONAL BEST SELLER AND AWARD WINNER 

A haunting, virtuosic debut novel about two young men who fall in love during World War I. “Will live in your mind long after you’ve closed the final pages.” —Maggie O’Farrell, best-selling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait

A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, NPR

“In Memoriam is the story of a great tragedy, but it is also a moving portrait of young love.”—The New York Times

It’s 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting.

Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle–an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood–without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. When Gaunt’s family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. To Gaunt’s horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.

An epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut.

Judges: The 2023 Winner Tess Gunty; Students from the VCU MFA in Creative Writing Program; and the Cabell First Novelist Award Committee

Finalists:  Jinwoo Chong for Flux (Melville House) and Gerardo Sámano Córdova for Monstrilio (Zando)