Tony Tulathimutte, author of the 2025 novel Rejection, has been named the inaugural recipient of the Jack Galef Literary Arts Award, a new $150,000 prize for graduates of the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, per lithub.com.
The award, named after poet and 1967 Iowa graduate Jack Galef, will be presented every two years to support both emerging and established writers.
Winners are chosen by a committee of workshop faculty. Tulathimutte, who is currently teaching at Iowa as a visiting faculty member, is himself an alumnus of the programme.
Iowa Writers’ Workshop director Lan Samantha Chang said she was “delighted to award the inaugural prize to an iconic writer of pathbreaking fiction.”
Tulathimutte’s previous honours include a Whiting Award and a National Book Award longlisting. In a statement, he said financial insecurity remains an underappreciated barrier to writing: “One of the things everybody knows but almost everybody underrates is just how much of an impediment to writing the struggle for a livelihood is.”
•Featured image: Tony Tulathimutte/lithub.com