Announcing the winner of the Restless Books 2025 Kellman Prize for New Immigrant Writing.

Literary Hub is pleased to announce the winner of the Restless Books 2025 Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature, an annual award given to a first-time, first-generation immigrant author that includes a $10,000 advance, a writing residency from Millay Arts, and publication by Restless Books. This year’s prize goes to Stephen Narain for his novel The Church of Mastery, which will be published in 2027.

Set at the dawn of World War II, The Church of Mastery follows a boy named William (Billy Boy) Jones as he tries to find his footing on a small Caribbean island where mangos grow and other boys pelt the back of his head with spitballs. William has discovered poetry, and must learn how to fight back and run fast. Eventually, he 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?

Stephen tells us that while his work on the novel was inspired by the work of Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, James Baldwin, and Marilynne Robinson, “it also emerges from my own struggle to protect the sacred interior self in the face of empire, market, and institution.” He adds, “In a moment when immigrant literature is often expected to perform trauma or assimilation, the novel insists on a subtler revolution: the sovereignty of the inner life, the glories of transcendence.”

This year’s prize was judged by authors Dinaw Mengestu, Rajiv Mohabir, and Ilan Stavans, who have this to say about Stephen’s work:

“In dazzling prose that moves like a sea of poetry, Stephen Narain in his book The Church of Mastery presents to his readers the flayed and rigorous survival of a poet’s heart. The protagonist, William Jones, born in a fictitious Caribbean nation, wades through the weight of colonial education that does not prepare him adequately for his migration to the United States. On the outside of social circles, national identities, and family, I can’t help but see so much of the post-colonial Guyanese condition illuminated: always realization and deferred understanding until the protagonist stands firmly in ‘foreign,’ where there is no simple categorization of people or the deepness of the oceans they wade into remembering their wholeness. I love this Guyanese American book!”

–Rajiv Mohabir

“Stephen Narain’s wise and magisterial first novel is at once a story of home and migration, of love and loss, but above all it is a novel fully vested in the singular power of language and beauty to transform our world.”

–Dinaw Mengestu

“From the first lines it’s evident that this is a new voice, alive with the exuberance of language and a rhythm as natural and verdant as the scenes it describes. Only an immigrant novel could cover so much ground—here, the story of one young man’s determination to remain true to the life he wants, to a poetry only he can hear, unfolds into an improbable road trip through history and time, segregation and the Deep South, God and music, literature and irreverence, with a narrator that surprises at every turn.”

–Ilan Stavans

Stephen Narain was raised in the Bahamas by Guyanese parents and moved to Miami at seventeen. A graduate of Harvard College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the recipient of the John Thouron Prize at Cambridge University, the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, the Small Axe Fiction Prize, the Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing, and the Bristol Short Story Prize. His fiction and essays have appeared in Small Axe: A Platform for Caribbean Criticism, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Wasafiri’s special issue on the afterlives of indentured labor. Before beginning his PhD at the University of Miami, Stephen spent over a decade teaching literature and writing at the University of Iowa, Valencia College in Orlando, and The Door: A Center of Alternatives, a youth advocacy center in Lower Manhattan.

You can read an excerpt from The Church of Mastery in The Common.