Olufunke Grace Bankole has won the 2026 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, which honors an outstanding debut novel published during the preceding calendar year.  

Her winning novel, The Edge of Water (Tin House Books, 2025) is garnering national acclaim on the literary prize circuit. She is the winner of the Westport Prize for Literature, winner of the Ploughshares John C. Zacharis First Book Award, and a Best Book of the Year at TIME Magazine, Apple Books, Debutiful, Electric Literature, Chicago Review of Books, Well-Read Black Girl and more. The Edge of Water was also Longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the New American Voices Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award, the Pacific Northwest Book Awards and the Oregon Book Awards. It has been widely praised, including by Oprah Daily, Goodreads, Ms. Magazine, Book Riot, Brittle Paper, The Root and The Lagos Review. 

Bankole will receive the award during a public event at VCU on Nov. 12. The event will involve a reading, discussion and Q&A. Details of the event and additional materials will be made available at firstnovelist.vcu.edu/event/.

Bankole was one of three finalists for the prize, now in its 25th year. The other finalists were Homeseeking by Karissa Chen and North Sun, or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther by Ethan Rutherford. 

Bankole is a Nigerian American writer, and The Edge of Water tells the story of a young Nigerian woman who dreams of life in America and how a devastating storm tests the bonds of a family.   

As described by the publisher: In Nigeria, a mother receives a divination that foretells danger for her daughter in America. In spite of this warning, she allows her to forge her own path, and Amina arrives in New Orleans filled with hope. But just as Amina begins to find her way, a hurricane threatens to destroy the city, upending everything she’d dreamed of and the lives of all she holds dear. Years later, her daughter is left with questions about the mother she barely knew, and the family she has yet to discover in Nigeria.

The publisher describes The Edge of Water as a luminous debut novel about a young woman brave enough to leave all she knows behind, and the way her fate transforms a family.  

Beyond her debut novel, Bankole's work has appeared in various publications, including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review, Poets & Writers, and elsewhere. She won the first-place prize in the Glimmer Train Short-Story Award for New Writers and was the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. 

She is a graduate of Harvard Law School. She has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a residency-fellowship from the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology.

The VCU Cabell First Novelist Award celebrates the VCU MFA in Creative Writing program’s year long novel workshop, the first in the nation and one of the few still in existence. The winning author receives a $5,000 prize and participates in an event, traditionally in person, with two additional panelists, most often the agent and editor of the winning book. The event, open to all, focuses on the creation, publication and promotion of the author's first novel.

The VCU Cabell First Novelist Award is presented on behalf of VCU’s M.F.A. in Creative Writing program. Sponsors include: the James Branch Cabell Library Associates, VCU Libraries, the Friends of VCU Libraries, the VCU Department of English, and the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences.

Over 200 novels were submitted for this year’s prize. A university-wide panel of readers in addition to members of the Richmond community reduced the submissions to a Top 20 Longlist. From there, the Longlist was considered by the MFA in Creative Writing students, who further narrowed the submissions from a Top 10 Shortlist to three finalists. The final round of judging included the MFA students and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Committee, with the previous year’s winner, Anne de Marcken, acting as a tie-breaking vote if needed.