Winners

2013 Winner

Twelfth Annual Award
No One Is Here Except All of Us (Riverhead Books)
By Ramona Ausubel

When the violence of World World II encroaches upon the remote Romanian village of Zalischik, its Jewish residents, feeling both trapped by the advancing Axis forces and isolated from all possible help, determine that the one way for them to continue with their lives is to pretend that their peaceful home is the only place in the world. They cast out anything that might tie them to the old world and try to forget the past, but how long will they be able to maintain their small new world before the war comes crashing down upon them?

No Is Here Except All of Us was a New York Times "Editor's Choice" and was named a "Best Book" by both the San Francisco Chronicle and The Huffington Post, and it was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Christine Schutt, author of Prosperous Friends and All Souls, describes the novel as "a wise, compassionate book that even in its darkest turns uplifts."

Ramona Ausubel is also the author of a collection of short stories, titled A Guide to Being Born, which was also a New York Times "Editor's Choice" and was long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Story Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, One Story, and The Best American Fantasy, and it has been short-listed in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading.

Judges: Samantha Dunn (author of the novel Failing Paris and two memoirs), Liz Humes (president of WRIR-FM, a Richmond-based independent radio station, and host of the Wordy Birds radio show), and Justin Torres (author of We the Animals and recipient of the 2012 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award)

Finalists: Nick Dybek for When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man (Riverhead Books) and Tupelo Hassman for Girlchild (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)