Restless Books’ Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature, formerly the Prize for New Immigrant Writing, announced the finalists for the 10th iteration of the award at an event at Manhattan's Tenement Museum on November 13: Jaguar by Beto Caradepiedra, The Conviction of Things Not Seen by Isabel Cristina Legarda, The Church of Mastery by Stephen Narain, and Drownproofing and Other Stories by Alexandra Lytton Regalado.

The event was bookended by a celebration of the writers whose careers have been boosted in the past decade by the honor, which awards $10,000, a writing residency, and publication with Restless to an immigrant author writing in English who, in the words of Restless publisher Ilán Stavans, "tells a story of what it means to move from one place to another at this particular time."

Stavans appealed to the fact that migration is "a story as old as humankind"—a small sliver of which was palpable underneath the tenement apartment that had housed generations of Jewish, Chinese, and other immigrants to New York City—but the more timely dimensions of the prize were an unavoidable fact of the evening. After the Trump administration's cuts to federal arts funding nearly upended the prize earlier this year, Steven Kellman, a translingual literature professor at the University of Texas San Antonio, stepped in to underwrite it in September. Kellman, who was in attendance, spoke to his grandparents' experiences immigrating to the U.S. from Eastern Europe, adding, "We can learn a lot from the writings of immigrants: we can learn about hardship, we can learn about injustice, perseverance, courage."

Stavans also held up another, more unexpected, component of the immigrant experience—humor. He praised Sofi Stambo’s story collection People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much, which won the prize in 2024 and will be published in May 2026) for its comedic sensibility, a mode of immigrant narrative which, he said, has often been overshadowed by tragedy in recent years.

Stambo, who was born in Bulgaria and has lived and worked in New York for 16 years, told PW that the Restless prize has opened up a new dimension in her writing. "The way I struggle to say things is endearing, oftentimes very funny," she said. At the same time, she said there is a "struggle you have to go through, even on that level, to express how you feel."

For Deepak Unnikrishnan, who became the inaugural recipient of the prize in 2016 for his novel Temporary People (Restless, 2017), the award felt like an entryway into the literary world itself. Unnikrishnan told PW that his winning manuscript, an "oddball" work he wrote as an art student, was "rejected by close to 50 agents and almost two dozen publishing houses across three continents." He added, "The prize put me on the map as a writer willing to take risks."

Unnikrishnan said that Restless also wanted to submit his book for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, but at the time they were only open to U.S. citizens. Though Pulitzers and National Book Awards opened eligibility to permanent and longtime residents in 2023 and 2024, respectively, Unnikrishnan noted the enduring need for the Restless prize.

"I wanted the opportunity to compete, to be offered the chance to rub shoulders with literary heavyweights, irrespective of my port of entry, the languages my elders spoke, or how my body became an archive," he said. "I can assure you there are many more like me, waiting to be discovered, to enter the literary arts in order to remain."

Back at the event, Stavans ventured that the prize, in being one of the rare venues dedicated to immigrant narratives in the U.S., also held a political significance. "We are in the middle of a very intense conversation that looks at immigrants as threatening or undermining our democracy," he said. "What we're hoping to do at Restless is to allow those immigrants to speak for themselves."

Restless will name its 10th winner, and first official recipient of the Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature, on December 2.