Swift River by Essie Chambers (Simon & Schuster) has won the $15,000 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, which is given to an emerging African American fiction writer, celebrates the legacy of the late Ernest Gaines, and is sponsored by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation.
Organizers commented: "Set in 1987 Massachusetts, Swift River follows Diamond Newberry, the only Black teenager in her rural town, as she unravels family secrets that reshape her identity and connection to generations of African American women. A coming-of-age story that explores themes of belonging, loss, and generational memory. The novel has been hailed as 'poetic and propulsive' (NPR) and 'funny and poignant' (the New Yorker)."
Swift River was a Today Show Read with Jenna Book Club pick, won the 2024 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
"Winning an award bearing Mr. Gaines' name is deeply humbling," Chambers said. "His stories, rooted in truth and community, continue to guide writers like me who strive to reflect the lives of people often left out of the literary landscape."
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The Artist by Lucy Steeds has won the £5,000 (about $6,720) 2025 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. The company wrote, "An intoxicating tale of art, love and secrets set across a sun-drenched Provençal summer in 1920, Steeds's masterly debut revolves around a fabled, reclusive painter, an aspiring British journalist set on penning a piece on him, and the artist's seemingly unworldly niece Ettie who harbors an explosive secret. Blending mystery and slow-burning romance with lush, cinematic prose and exquisite characterization, The Artist is an absorbing study in monstrous egos, self-discovery and the power of art, filled with dexterous detail for the senses."
Bea Carvalho, head of books, Waterstones, added: "From a shortlist of six stunning books, The Artist stood out for its atmospheric, sensory prose, and its headily evocative sense of time and place. Lucy Steeds is a writer of staggering, rare talent: she is able to conjure vivid brushstrokes, sticky heat, and the smells and tastes of Provence, through words on the page. This is a gorgeously claustrophobic novel to be fully swept away by: The Artist has something for readers of all tastes and heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice."