Chautauqua Institution is pleased to announce seven exceptional books as the 2025 finalists for The Chautauqua Prize, now in its 14th year:   

• We’re Alone: Essays by Edwidge Danticat (Graywolf Press) 
• No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust by Chris Heath (Schocken) 
• By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land by Rebecca Nagle (Harper) 
• Whale Fall: A Novel by Elizabeth O’Connor (Pantheon Books) 
• The Fertile Earth: A Novel by Ruthvika Rao (Flatiron Books) 
• The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger (Harper) 
• Load in Nine Times: Poems by Frank X Walker (Liveright) 

In the first year considering full-length poetry collections alongside works of fiction and literary nonfiction, this finalist list celebrates the variety and vitality of the literary world in what was yet another year of a record-breaking number of submissions from publishers, agents and authors. “This year’s list of finalists for The Chautauqua Prize is composed of narratives of revelation and surprise,” said guest judge Andrew Krivák. “On every level — form, content and voice — these authors have all written accounts that will overturn readers’ expectations of what they’re in for. Each book is an incredible journey.”  

The 2025 finalists for The Chautauqua Prize were selected from a longlist of entries read and reviewed by 118 volunteer Chautauquans who are writers, publishers, educators, editors, librarians and avid readers. This year, the Prize jury included award-winning scholars and writers Gena E. Chandler and Krivák as guest judges. Both Chandler and Krivák will join the literary arts program at Chautauqua Institution this summer as part of the Institution’s Masters Series.  

In addition to these two distinguished guest judges, The Chautauqua Prize jury comprised Kwame Alexander, the Michael I. Rudell Artistic Director of Literary Arts; Stephine Hunt, managing director of literary arts; Jordan Steves, the Emily and Richard Smucker Chair for Education; Sara Toth, lecture associate and editor of The Chautauquan Daily; and Emily Carpenter, the Prize administrator and coordinator of the Department of Education. 

Awarded annually since 2012, the Prize draws upon Chautauqua Institution’s considerable literary legacy to celebrate a book that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and to honor the author for a significant contribution to the literary arts. The winning book will be selected from these finalists and announced in early June.   

A finalist for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle for Nonfiction and an NPR.org, Publishers Weekly and Electric Literature Best Book of 2024, Edwidge Danticat’s essay collection We’re Alone “elegantly and eloquently” illustrates the intricacies of life in Haiti from her childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic. Readers praised this essay collection for its effortless combination of the “political, historical, cultural, and personal,” calling it a “glimpse inside the mind of one of our best contemporary novelists.” Others described Danticat’s collection as “striking and compelling” and a “worthwhile read” for anyone seeking to “enrich their knowledge of the author to better appreciate her other works.” 

Chris Heath’s remarkable biography of a dozen prisoners who escaped the Lithuanian forest of Ponar after the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe in 1941, No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust, is an “impeccably researched and exceptionally crafted” piece of history that has been declared by readers to be both “shattering and hope-giving.” A Washington Post Best Book of the Year and the National Jewish Book Award Finalist in 2024, Heath presents a narrative that is equal parts biography, memoir, narrative journalism, and political history of “a story you think you know” that “turns out to be something entirely different, gripping, and compelling.”  

In a powerful work of reportage implicating the braided social, legal, and political histories of Indigenous removal in the United States, By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land by Rebecca Nagle presents a “thoroughly researched” and “insightful, tense narrative for America.” The book has been named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard First Book Prize, the winner of the Oklahoma Historical Society’s E. E. Dale Award, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction, and shortlisted or named a finalist for a variety of other awards. Nagle’s work has been lauded for its “unabashed style” combing Native oral traditions, journalistic flair, and elements of true crime, keeping readers “ensnared.” A chronicle of both a “contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance,” readers said, By the Fire We Carry is truly “a landmark work of American history.” 

Like the whale that washes ashore on a small island off the coast of Wales in Elizabeth O’Connor’s remarkable debut, Whale Fall: A Novel is a story readers will admire and reckon with as a celebration of the beauty within decay. Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and NPR, an ALA Notable Fiction Book, and longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, O’Connor’s novel has been admired by readers for its “spare but poignant prose.” Readers declared this novel a “striking, sensual” work that is “rich in metaphor” and “a reading experience that is wholly other.” 

Ruthvika Rao’s The Fertile Earth: A Novel is a “vast, ambitious debut” that insists upon the “enduring ties of love and family loyalty” in post-independence and post-colonial India. One reader praised Rao’s novel as a work that “wraps history, time, place, and deeply resonant characters in language as stunning as it is accessible.” Named a finalist for The Center for Fiction’s 2024 First Novel Prize, The Fertile Earth is a novel that “sings,” with one reader asserting it presents narrative that will “stay with me for a very long time.” 

As a “masterpiece of science writing,” The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger is a book that readers proclaimed “creative, curious, and accessible,” and yet, “unlike anything I’ve ever encountered.” Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Nonfiction Prize, named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of the National Outdoor Book Award for Natural History, among a variety of other accolades, Schlanger’s work “altered” readers’ “understanding of the natural world while providing a satisfying literary experience.” Readers proclaimed it as a work that “rises off the page” and a narrative that is both “a scientific and literary feast” that “inspires and stuns.”  

Load in Nine Times: Poems by Frank X Walker is a “carefully researched” “distinctive” and “accessible” collection from an Affrilachian poet like no other. Throughout the collection, Walker reveals “a variegated and complex view” of Kentucky plantation life, addresses the “heartbreak and horrors” of the Civil War, and gives voice to “slavery’s continuing legacy in contemporary Kentucky.” Through various poetic devices, inclusion of historical documents, a timeline, and other various cited materials, the Winner of the 2025 PEN/Voelcker Award for a Poetry Collection offers readers “a resounding ode to the powerful ties of individual and cultural ancestry” from the “unmemorialized history of Black Kentucky.”  

ABOUT THE CHAUTAUQUA PRIZE   
Awarded annually since 2012, The Chautauqua Prize draws upon Chautauqua Institution’s considerable literary legacy to celebrate a book that provides a richly rewarding reading experience and to honor the author for a significant contribution to the literary arts. The author of the winning book will receive $7,500 and will participate in a Prize ceremony and reading on the grounds of Chautauqua Institution during the 2025 Summer Assembly. For more information, visit prize.chq.org.    

ABOUT CHAUTAUQUA LITERARY ARTS   
With a history steeped in the literary arts, Chautauqua Institution is the home of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, founded in 1878, which honors at least nine outstanding books of fiction, nonfiction, essays and poetry with community discussions and author presentations every summer. Further literary arts programs at Chautauqua include the annual Kwame Alexander Writers’ Lab & Conference, as well as the summer-long workshops, craft lectures, and readings from some of the very best author-educators in North America at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center. Chautauqua Literary Arts is led by the Michael I. Rudell Artistic Director of the Literary Arts, an endowed chair established in memory of a beloved Chautauquan who, among other things, inspired Chautauqua’s first literary award, The Chautauqua Prize.  

ABOUT CHAUTAUQUA INSTITUTION   
Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer — and year-round through the CHQ Assembly online platform — with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. As a community, we celebrate, encourage and study the arts and treat them as integral to all of learning, and we convene the critical conversations of the day to advance understanding through civil dialogue.   

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