- Immigrant Times
- Sep 28
- 4 min read
The New Immigrant Writing Prize
Immigrant writers offer their stories of hardship, longing and joy
By The Immigrant Times’ Literary Editor
Books by immigrant writers: The City of Good Death by Priyanka Champaneri; Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan; The Body Papers by Grace Talusan
September 2025: In an era when immigrants are too often reduced to headlines, statistics, or scapegoats, the New Immigrant Writing Prize (now renamed The Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature)* stands as a quiet act of resistance and a bold celebration. It affirms what policy debates and border rhetoric frequently obscure: that immigrants are not just subjects of stories, but authors of them. And their voices are not marginal - they are central to the cultural, political, and emotional fabric of our time.
Across Europe, the Americas, and beyond, immigrants face rising hostility, from surveillance and detention to exclusionary laws and cultural erasure. Yet amid this climate, immigrant writers continue to craft narratives that defy simplification. They write of longing and belonging, of fractured identities and fierce resilience. They write in multiple tongues, across genres, and through hybrid forms that challenge literary norms and national boundaries alike.
The New Immigrant Writing Prize does more than reward literary excellence. It legitimises the immigrant gaze. It says: your story matters, your syntax matters, your metaphors matter, even if they don’t conform to dominant aesthetics or politics. Especially then.
When immigrants are demonised, literature becomes a counter-narrative. It humanises what politics dehumanises. It complicates what media flattens. It offers nuance where public discourse demands binaries. The Prize, in this sense, is not just cultural; it is political. It shifts the locus of authority from institutions to individuals, from gatekeepers to storytellers.
And crucially, it invites readers, immigrant and non-immigrant alike, into a space of empathy, discomfort, and transformation.
This is not about tokenism. It’s about reclamation. The Prize helps immigrant writers reclaim their own stories from the margins, from the archives, from the footnotes of national histories. It offers not just visibility, but agency. And in doing so, it reshapes the literary canon to reflect the realities of migration, displacement, and diasporic creativity.
The Prize is a beginning, not an end. Its existence challenges publishers to rethink whose voices they amplify. It urges educators to diversify syllabi. It invites readers to seek out stories that unsettle, illuminate, and expand their worldview.
In a time of border walls and cultural silos, the New Immigrant Writing Prize builds bridges—sentence by sentence, story by story.
Past winners
The New Immigrant Writing Prize, presented by Restless Books (now renamed the Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature), has honoured a powerful line-up of debut immigrant voices since its inception. Here are some of the past winners whose work has helped redefine contemporary immigrant literature:
Temporary People
By Deepak Unnikrishnan
Guest workers of the United Arab Emirates embody multiple worlds and identities and long for home in a fantastical debut work of fiction, winner of the inaugural Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. An enchanting, unparalleled anthem of displacement and repatriation. Over 20 publishers had rejected it before winning the prize, and later received recognition from PEN America and the Center for Fiction
Antiman
By Rajiv Mohabir
Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Rajiv Mohabir’s Antiman is an impassioned, genre-blending memoir that navigates the fraught constellations of race, sexuality, and cultural heritage that have shaped his experiences as an Indo-Guyanese queer poet and immigrant to the United States. It won acclaim for its poetic form and emotional depth.
The Body Papers
By Grace Talusan
Grace Talusan’s critically acclaimed memoir The Body Papers, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, powerfully explores the fraught contours of her own life as a Filipino immigrant and survivor of cancer and childhood abuse.
Between This World
By Praveen Herat
Praveen Herat’s gripping literary thriller is a breathtaking exploration of power, identity, unconditional love, and the question of how far we’ll go to uncover the truth.
The Invention of Exile
By Vanessa Manko
A novel tracing the life of a Russian immigrant wrongly accused of anarchism, navigating exile and identity across continents.
The City of Good Death
By Priyanka Champaneri
A novel set in India’s holy city of Banaras, exploring death, ritual, and spiritual labour through the eyes of a death hostel manager.
* About the publisher Restless Books
Restless Books is an independent, non-profit publisher devoted to championing essential voices from around the world whose stories speak to readers across linguistic and cultural borders.
In May 2025, the US National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) cancelled a grant, claiming that Restless Books’ publishing programme does not further the Trump administration’s new agenda for literary merit. Following the NEA’s decision, Steven Kellman, a comparative literature professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and his family stepped in and offered a gift of $300,000. According to Restless Books, the donation guarantees the continuation of the Prize, now renamed the ‘Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature’, in perpetuity.
On other pages: The Immigrant Times Solidarity Prize 2026 ||
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