J&N Clients Justin Driver, Angela Garcia, Richard Hasen, Lucy Ives, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and Namwali Serpell have been awarded Guggenheim Fellowships. “Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and President of the Guggenheim Foundation. “As the Foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work, undaunted by the challenges ahead. We are honored to support their visionary contributions.”

Stephanie Wambugu's debut novel LONELY CROWDS is the winner of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, a finalist for the Young Lion's Fiction Award, and was longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Stephanie was also named a National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35” honoree. Little, Brown, and Company published LONELY CROWDS on July 29, 2025.

Addie Citchens' DOMINION was selected as a finalist for the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction. The citation reads: "While this year’s shortlist spans an incredible breadth of themes, geographies, time periods, and literary styles, the six shortlisted novels each interrogate the roles women play in society and the power they hold, and explore themes of agency, human connection, and the joy of literature, centring very different, but unforgettable, protagonists." The winner will be announced on June 11 at the Women’s Prize Trust’s summer party in London. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published DOMINONS on August 19, 2025.

Julia Elliott's story collection HELLIONS was named a finalist for the Carole Shields Prize for Fiction. The winner of the prize will receive $150,000 USD and a five-night stay at Fogo Island Inn, while the four finalists will each receive $12,500 USD. The jury’s citation for HELLIONS reads: “This eerie, eclectic, genre-leaping collection takes no half-measures; every sentence of HELLIONS crackles or crawls. Here, human folly moves against a backdrop of horror and magic. There’s folklore in these stories, and Southern gothic horror, and surrealism, and fantasy, and, at their center, a thread of uneasy, bodily realism. The work evokes writers like Angela Carter, Dorothy Allison, Gloria Naylor, and Kelly Link. But for all its wildness, there is tremendous control; Elliot is a gifted and thrilling writer.” The winner will be announced on June 2 at a ceremony in Toronto. Tin House published HELLIONS on April 15, 2025.

Seth Fishman's BAD DRAWER is the Arkansas Diamond Book Award’s Third Place Winner for 2024 - 2025. The award will be formally presented by the Arkansas Literacy Association at Harding University in July 2026. The book was published by Penguin Workshop on October 25, 2022.

Susanna Kwan’s debut novel AWAKE IN THE FLOATING CITY is one of three finalists for the 2026 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. In a statement, 2026 judges Rachel Beanland, Dionne Irving, and Taymour Soomro said: “While these books are very different from one another, they each in their own way speak to loneliness and grief and this sense that, in the midst of so much chaos and loss, we are wired to keep going and to strive for connection and meaning. These books approached some heavy subjects—death, displacement, and even heartbreak—with honesty, humility and humor, and in reading them, we felt cracked open and also maybe, in some small way, hopeful.” The winner will be announced in early April, and all three finalists will be honored on April 26 at the 50th Anniversary PEN/Hemingway Award Ceremony. Pantheon published AWAKE IN THE FLOATING CITY on May 13, 2025.

Eugene Lim is the winner of the 2025 John Dos Passos Prize, the oldest literary award given by a Virginia college or university, which honors “a talented American writer who experiments with form, explores a range of voices and merits further recognition.” Dr. David Magill, chair of the Department of English and Modern Languages at Longwood, said: “Eugene Lim’s work is completely unique in its formal innovations and its elegant yet accessible prose…Lim manages to pack so much into every page, taking us on a wild journey of adventure with each sentence. He is breathtakingly original and a writer not to be missed.” Coffee House Press published Lim’s most recent novel, SEARCH HISTORY, on October 5, 2021. His next novel, SPACE BAR, will be published by Doubleday in 2027.

AWAKE IN THE FLOATING CITY, the debut novel by Susanna Kwan, has won the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association’s award for Asian American Adult Fiction. Pantheon published AWAKE IN THE FLOATING CITY on May 13, 2025.

Haley Mlotek’s debut, NO FAULT: A MEMOIR OF ROMANCE AND DIVORCE, has won the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction: “Deftly combining her personal story with wry, searching social and literary exploration, NO FAULT is a brilliant account of 21st century divorce—its remarkably common yet seemingly singular impact, and what it reveals about our society and our desires for family, love, and friendship. Mlotek asks profound questions about what divorce should be, who it is for, and why the institution of marriage maintains its power, all while charting a poignant and cathartic journey away from her own marriage and towards an unknown future. Brilliant, funny, and unflinchingly honest, NO FAULT is a kaleidoscopic look at marriage, secrets, ambitions, and what it truly means to love and live with uncertainty, betrayal, and hope.” Viking published NO FAULT on February 18, 2025.

Yrsa Daley-Ward’s debut novel THE CATCH has been shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. Judge Simon Okotie praises: “THE CATCH is an extraordinary shape-shifting, genre-defying work of fiction. Reading, by turns, as popular fiction, literary fiction and science fiction, it calls all such distinctions into question. An engrossing and thought-provoking work, THE CATCH brings a compulsive, formally inventive logic that is all its own." The winner of the award will be announced on November 5, 2025. Liveright published THE CATCH in the US on June 3, 2025.