About the Prize

AWARD INFORMATION

Rufi Thorpe’s novel, Margo’s Got Money Troubles, has won the 2026 L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize of $25,000. Recent winners include Isabella Hammad, Jamal Jan Kochai, Percival Everett, Raven Leilani, Chia-Chia Lin, Rebecca Makkai, Daniel Alarcón, Jim Shepard and Colson Whitehead.

Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a hilarious and poignant literary novel about a young single mother who reluctantly turns to OnlyFans—and advice from her estranged pro-wrestler father—in order to make ends meet. Blisteringly funny and sharply insightful, Margo’s Got Money Troubles is also a tender tale of a heroine struggling to wrest control over her own fate, and over her own narrative, both on the internet and off.

This year’s Clark Prize judge, O. Henry Award-winning author Kevin Brockmeier, chose Thorpe’s novel from a shortlist of four outstanding books of fiction selected by the Clark Prize committee, including Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, The Most by Jessica Anthony, and I’ll Give You a Reason by Annell López.

Of Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Brockmeier writes: “You wouldn't think that a novel about economic vulnerability, online sex work, romantic predation, drug addiction, and the callousness of the state would ring such a note of hope. Yet here you have it. Margo's Got Money Troubles, which claims the page with such warmth and humor that no matter how difficult its heroine's life becomes, you always feel the book embracing her—and therefore, in its way, embracing you, too. For me at least, the fact that the book is so charming and surprising, and that it accepts every narrative dare it offers itself, are not even the highest of its virtues, which is that it is able to display so much intelligence with so little cynicism. It’s a mistake to believe that writing into the darkness is the only mark of sophistication for a story and that writing into the light never is. That’s what Thorpe does here, writes into the light of her characters’ lives, and novels, I think, should do that at least as often as the world does.”

AUTHOR BIO

Rufi Thorpe received her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2009. She is the author of the novels The Girls from Corona Del Mar, Dear Fang, With Love, and The Knockout Queen, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award. Margo’s Got Money Troubles is being adapted as an eight-part miniseries by A24 and Apple TV, starring Elle Fanning, Nicole Kidman, Michelle Pfeiffer, Michael Workéyè, and Nick Offerman, and is set to release on April 15, 2026.

EVENT INFORMATION

Date: Wednesday, April 8th, 2026
Time: 3-5pm
Location: The Wittliff Collections in Alkek Library, Texas State University
Event Details: 3-3:30pm: Pre-award Reception; 3:30pm-5pm: Reading/Q&A/Book Signing

 

Isabella Hammad was born in London. Her writing has appeared in publications including Conjunctions, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. She was awarded the 2018 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and a 2019 O. Henry Prize. Her first novel The Parisian (2019) won a Palestine Book Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Betty Trask Award from the Society of Authors in the UK. She was a National Book Foundation '5 Under 35' Honoree, and has received literary fellowships from MacDowell, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Lannan Foundation. She was selected as one of the Granta 'Best of Young British Novelists' in 2023.  Her second novel, Enter Ghost, was published in 2023.