This year, 2025, marks the tenth anniversary of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, which supports immigrant writers whose work examines how immigration shapes our lives, our communities, and our world. In honor of the anniversary, Restless Books’ unstintingly generous board member, Steven G. Kellman—whose grandparents were immigrants to the United States—has endowed the prize so that it may continue in perpetuity. As ICE and federal agents invade our cities, we hope the newly named Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature can serve as a reminder that immigrants’ voices deserve to be heard. Anyone familiar with history knows that immigrants have always been the gravitational center of the extraordinary American experiment.
Of course, freedom is not only under siege in America, but all across the globe. As autocrats deny the rights of people in Palestine, in Sudan, in Ukraine to remain on their own land, forced displacement is happening everywhere.
The 2025 Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature was judged by Dinaw Mengestu, Rajiv Mohabir, and Ilan Stavans; the winner will be announced by LitHub on December 2. Please join us in celebrating the work of the following four finalists, and in holding up the power of immigrant stories to remind us of our common humanity. No one is free until all of us are free.
— Restless Books
Jaguar by Beto Caradepiedra
Eleven interwoven stories follow a Panamanian family across four generations of loss, triumph, and devotion in Jaguar, charting their way through the shifting landscapes of Panama and New York City. Hunted by crocodiles and jaguars, protected by dogs and the sea, each new offspring faces their own privations to survive, sustained by family, community, doubt, and determination.
The Conviction of Things Not Seen by Isabel Cristina Legarda
Haunted by preoccupations with ancestry, displacement, faith, and loss, the stories collected in The Conviction of Things Not Seen explore the lives of Filipinos at home and in the Philippine diaspora, and their ability as immigrants to straddle two worlds. Here, a matriarch and her neighbors living in a Manila cemetery try to build a life in the shadow of drug raids and failed relationships; a concert pianist’s collaboration with a visiting artist brings up challenging memories from her past; four women host ghost tours at a Savannah bed-and-breakfast; and a young woman murdered under a totalitarian regime is investigated as a candidate for sainthood through her friends’ letters, journal entries, and text messages.
The Church of Mastery by Stephen Narain
At the dawn of World War II, a boy named William (Billy Boy) Jones is trying to find his footing on a small Caribbean island where mangos grow and other boys pelt the back of his head with spitballs. William learns how to run fast, discovers poetry, and eventually migrates to America. Searching for what he calls “the perfect poem” amid romantic loss and spiritual doubt, he finds himself traveling with a group of like-minded artists in the deep South during the height of segregation. Is it possible to build a life around beauty when the world is only interested in institution and survival, capitalism and compromise?
Drownproofing and Other Stories by Alexandra Lytton Regalado
A collection of interconnected narratives exploring identity, inheritance, trauma, and survival in contemporary Central America and its diaspora, Drownproofing and Other Stories takes place across the landscapes of El Salvador, Florida, and psychic memory. From daughters navigating motherhood and myth to a fisherman haunted by a lakeside ghost story, the collection bears witness to the fault lines of violence and grace, privilege and exile running through lives shaped by displacement, tenderness, and the will to surface.
