Maria Reva has won the $35,000 Aspen Words Literary Prize, given annually to “an influential work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue,” for her novel, Endling.
Reva’s novel, published last June by Doubleday, follows two sisters who go in search of their missing activist mother and encounter a scientist determined to preserve a rare species of snail, set against the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine war. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize, “a noteworthy literary achievement and also a good story, sure to be widely discussed and enjoyed.”
In their citation for the prize, the jury wrote, “Endling is an audacious novel about people fighting many different kinds of extinction.…Endling becomes a story about women scrambling to save themselves, their families and their country—while also growing into a joyful and astonishing celebration of the novel itself, a literary form given new life and urgency by this groundbreaking, utterly unique work.”
One of the jurors, Héctor Tobar, added, “As jurors, we were impressed by the ambition of Endling, by the way it wove together ecological themes with an epic story about the war in Ukraine. At the same time, it was a bold work that played with the very idea of what the literary form of a novel can be."
The Aspen Words Literary Prize was established in 2018. Previous winners include Tayari Jones for An American Marriage, Dawnie Walton for The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, and Isabella Hammad for Enter Ghost.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
