About the Prize
In honor of L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark, who devoted their lives to literature and generously supported the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University, Texas State University’s English Department has established the $25,000 Clark Fiction Prize. The prize will be awarded annually to recognize an exceptional recently-published book-length work of fiction.
The Process
The Clark Prize Committee solicits nominations from distinguished writers around the country. No applications or unsolicited nominations for the award are accepted.
2025 Prize Winner: Isabella Hammad
AWARD INFORMATION
Isabella Hammad's Enter Ghost has won the Clark Prize for Fiction ($25,000), which is an annual fiction competition sponsored by the MFA Program at Texas State University. Recent winners include Jamil Jan Kochai, Chia-Chia Lin, Rebecca Makkai, Colson Whitehead, and Daniel Alarcón. This year's judge was Stacey Swann, who wrote:
With Enter Ghost, Isabella Hammad has created a deeply moving, brilliantly layered novel. The narrator Sonia’s personal history, her career as an actor, her strained relationship with her sister, and her evolving relationships with the director and cast of an Arabic-language production of Hamlet all exist within the masterfully-evoked world of both Israel and the West Bank, not as news or historical context but as a lived place deeply intertwined with each of the characters’ lives. Even with these complexities, even with the way Hamlet echoes throughout the plots and subplots, the novel is elegantly seamless, an organic whole that is even more than the sum of its parts.
EVENT INFORMATION
Date: Wednesday, April 9
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
AUTHOR BIO
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.
PAST WINNERS
2024 Prize Winner: Jamil Jan Kochai
Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award and a winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2023 Clark Fiction Prize. His debut novel 99 Nights in Logar was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. His essays have been published at The New Yorker, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Kochai was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches creative writing at California State University, Sacramento.