Maria Reva’s Endling has won the 2026 Aspen Words Literary Prize.

At a ceremony last night, Aspen Words announced the winner of their annual Aspen Words Literary Prize, which awards $35,000 to “a work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture.”

This year’s winner is Maria Reva, for her debut novel Endling. 

The AWLP jury described the book as “an audacious novel about people fighting many different kinds of extinction.

Part metafiction, part war chronicle, part absurdist picaresque, Maria Reva’s book begins with an ecological adventure in pre-war Ukraine involving, of all things, a critically endangered snail species. But the tale soon takes on metafictional twists and turns as real-life Russian tanks and soldiers invade the country. Endling becomes a story about women scrambling to save themselves, their families and their country—while also growing into a joyful and astonishing celebration of the novel itself, a literary form given new life and urgency by this groundbreaking, utterly unique work.

“As jurors, we were impressed by the ambition of Endling, by the way it wove together ecological themes with an epic story about the war in Ukraine,” said head juror Héctor Tobar in a statement. “At the same time, it was a bold work that played with the very idea of what the literary form of a novel can be.”

You can watch the awards ceremony here.