12/09/2025
We’re so thrilled to announce the winner of the 2025 Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature!
Congratulations to Stephen Narain! 🥳
“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
Thank you to for announcing the winner. Read the entire piece by tapping the link in our bio!
