Nominees for the 2025 Townsend Prize for Fiction, Georgia’s most prestigious literary award, were announced over the holidays. Presented by the Atlanta Writers Club and the Georgia Writers Museum, the biennial award recognizes the best novels and story collections written by a Georgia author. Previous winners include Mary Hood, Thomas Mullen, Ha Jin, Terry Kay and Alice Walker.
Published in 2023 or 2024, the 10 nominees feature five high-profile titles previously reviewed or featured in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. They include:
• Denene Millner’s “One Blood” (Forge Books, $29.99), a tale about generational trauma and what constitutes a family told through the perspectives of three women: an unwed mother forced to give her daughter up for adoption, the adoptive mother and their adult daughter, now pregnant with her own daughter.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
• Anissa Gray’s “Life and Other Love Songs” (Berkley, $18), a family saga spanning from the ‘60s to the ‘90s, from Detroit to Alabama, that explores how its members are affected by a father who goes missing.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
• Julia Franks’ “The Say So” (Hub City Press, $28), which also explores unplanned pregnancy, this time through the perspectives of two women, decades apart, whose options are radically different. (Franks won the Townsend in 2018 for “Over the Plain Houses.”)
• Gordon Johnston’s “Seven Islands of the Ocmulgee: River Stories” (Mercer, $20), a loosely related collection of seven evocative short stories spanning from 1810 to the present that explore themes of escape, discovery, power and redemption.
Credit: Harper Muse
Credit: Harper Muse
• Kimberly Brock’s “The Fabled Earth” (Harper Muse, $28.99), a historical novel set in 1959 on Cumberland Island where three women — a reclusive painter, a folklorist and a widowed innkeeper — contend with the aftereffects of tragic events that occurred on the island decades earlier.
The other five nominees are lesser-known titles from small presses or micropresses that don’t always have the resources to get the word out about their books. The Townsend often manages to shine a light on books that might otherwise be overlooked. Rounding out the list of nominees are:
Credit: Dzanc Books
Credit: Dzanc Books
• Chika Unigwe’s “The Middle Daughter” (Dzanc Books, $26.95), a retelling of the Greek myth of Hades and Persephone within a Nigerian family, in which a teenage girl mourning the death of her father and sister is lured away from her family by a self-proclaimed man of God whose violent tendencies force her to figure out a way to escape.
Credit: ELJ Editions
Credit: ELJ Editions
• Ra’Niqua Lee’s “For What Ails You” (ELJ Editions, $18), a collection of flash fiction that explores the Black femme experience in Atlanta.
Credit: Sartoris Literary Group
Credit: Sartoris Literary Group
• John M. Williams’ “End Times” (Sartoris Literary Group, $40), a mostly comical but occasionally tragic Southern tale about twin orphans growing up in small-town Georgia surrounded by a cast of colorful characters.
• Peter Selgin’s “A Boy’s Guide to Outer Space” (Regal House Publishing, $19.95), a 1963 coming of age story set in small-town Connecticut that follows the exploits of a boy mourning his father’s death and dreaming of being the first person on the moon.
• Barbara Tucker’s “Lying In” (Colorful Crow Publishing, 25.99), the story of a disfigured caregiver in 1918 Appalachia who’s unaware of the flu pandemic raging in the world beyond her small, insular realm.
The nominees were selected by a committee of folks in the Georgia literary community who read more than 50 submissions. The winner is selected by a panel of three literary fiction scholars from outside the state.
Named after the late Atlanta magazine editor Jim Townsend, the award will be presented at a ceremony April 16 at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, where the winner will receive a cash prize and a handcrafted award made by Frabel Glass studio. For more information, go to atlantawritersclub.org.
Credit: UGA Press
Credit: UGA Press
About literary prizes: Kentucky author Ellen Birkett Morris recently won the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence bestowed by Columbus State University for her novel “Beware the Tall Grass” (UGA Press, $22.95). The dual-narrative novel follows the exploits of Charlie, a contemporary boy who has disturbing, past-life memories of being a soldier in the Vietnam War, and Thomas, an actual soldier fighting in the war. The endowed prize includes a $10,000 cash prize and publication.
Suzanne Van Atten is a book critic and contributing editor to The Atlanta Journal Constitution. She may be reached at Suzanne.VanAtten@ajc.com.
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