Chautauqua Institution is pleased to announce seven exceptional books as the 2024 finalists for The Chautauqua Prize, now in its 13th year:   

• Chain-Gang All-Stars: A Novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Pantheon Books) 
• The Reformatory: A Novel by Tananarive Due (Saga Press) 
• Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country by Patricia Evangelista (Random House) 
• Enter Ghost: A Novel by Isabella Hammad (Grove Atlantic) 
• This Other Eden: A Novel by Paul Harding (W. W. Norton & Company) 
• White Cat, Black Dog: Stories by Kelly Link (Random House) 
• Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History by Emily Strasser (University Press of Kentucky) 

In another year of a record-breaking number of submissions from publishers, agents and authors, these seven books represent the variety and vitality of The Chautauqua Prize. 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 by early June.   

The 2024 finalists for The Chautauqua Prize were selected from a longlist of entries read and reviewed by 102 volunteer Chautauquans who are writers, publishers, educators, editors, librarians and avid readers. This year, the Prize jury included award-winning writers Victoria Christopher Murray and Phil Klay as guest judges. Both Murray and Klay will join the literary arts programming at Chautauqua Institution this summer — Murray to co-present The First Ladies: A Novel as a Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle author with co-author Marie Benedict on June 27, and Klay as part of the Institution’s Master Series programming on Aug. 6. 

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, manager 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. 

In his debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah examines an America in which systemic racism, wanton capitalism, and mass incarceration combine to create a new privatized and monetized gladiator production in the United States, on which the kaleidoscopic lives of his main characters take center stage as they fight to survive and pursue their freedom — by any means necessary. A work longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence, a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, and a New York Times Best Book of the Year, Chain-Gang All-Stars combines prose that is both provocative and brutal in its critique of the American incarceration system. Readers proclaimed this novel “powerful and unsettling,” full of “complicated moral decisions,” and an “important exploration of freedom and humanity.” Others called it a book constructed to “make speculative fiction as a genre — and the American prison system — accessible and consumable.” 

A Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner, an American Library Association Notable Book, and a New York Times Notable Book, The Reformatory is a genre-defying work that is equal parts historical fiction, magical realism, supernatural thriller and speculative fiction. As an American Book Award and NAACP Image Award­-winning author, as well as a UCLA professor of Black Horror and Afrofuturism, Tananarive Due has created a beautiful and evocative novel — set against the terrors of the Jim Crow South and based upon the experiences of her great-uncle who was a victim of the notorious Dozier School for Boys — that is uniquely hers to tell.  Readers declared this novel a work that demands “absorption and investment,” a story that “is both haunted and haunting,” “a force of its own,” and “masterfully done.”

In a work combining memoir, history, political analysis, and invigorating narrative journalism, reporter Patricia Evangelista weaves together a story of the Philippines’ War on Drugs fragmented by thousands of documented and undocumented killings carried out by police and vigilantes under the regime of Rodrigo Duterte. Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country — winner of the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award, longlisted for the Women’s Prize, and named a Times #1 Best Nonfiction Book of the Year, as well as a New York Times top 10 Best Book of the Year —is a courageous effort to bear witness and pay homage to the many victims and survivors of Duterte’s inhumane reign of terror, as well as a brilliant examination of the grammar of violence within the field of journalism. One reader declared this a testament to “survival, hope, and love for one’s country,” while another called Evangelista “an inspiration to courageous investigative journalists everywhere.” 

Enter Ghost — winner of The Aspen Words Literary Prize, shortlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book — is a beautiful and intricate rendering of diaspora and displacement, of homecoming and family, of the power of voice and intrigue of art, of the “texture of life” in present-day Palestine. National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree Isabella Hammad’s second novel is a tale of humanity and life at every stage — be it a stage in a theater, a stage of a young woman’s life, the intimate and intricate stage of a family narrative, or the timely, political stage of the Palestinian experience in the world. One reader trumpeted this novel as a narrative featuring “highly provocative inquiries about relationships between art and politics,” while another described the work as “a subtle yet unforgettable family story of admission and resistance.”  

In This Other Eden, — a novel shortlisted for The Booker Prize and named a National Book Award Finalist — Paul Harding contrives a story of one of the first integrated towns in the Northeast on an island off the coast of Maine in ambitious, rich prose. In a narrative that transcends centuries, race, and the perseverance of human dignity in the face of injustice and intolerance, Pulitzer Prize winner Harding offers readers a character driven story of epic proportions set in an age of racially charged violence, eugenics, wealth-fueled displacement, and brave resistance. Readers lauded this novel as one “addressing critical, urgent themes,” a work that is “emotionally poignant,” and a book of both “great writing and risks.” 

From MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist Kelly Link comes a short story collection of remixed fairytales, White Cat, Black Dog: Stories — named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Kirkus Review, and many others — which contains stories of complicated families, tumultuous relationships, wealth that is both monetary and found in the mundane, and the complicated nature of curiosity and secrets. Inside, readers will find inspiration from Brothers Grimm, French lore, Scottish ballads, and other classic fairytales mingled with Link’s skillful language play — a collection of works that is deftly reimagined in clever and unpredictable ways that ask readers to consider how the stories we know and grow with resonate within us. Readers called the collection “heart-racing,” “fresh,” “quirky, and somewhat creepy,” — ultimately, a collection of stories “that doesn’t miss.”  

Essayist and educator Emily Strasser unveils a multifaceted toxic legacy in Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning with a Hidden History. In writing that one reader called “fluid and expressive,” Strasser establishes a backdrop of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the 1940s, tying together a personal story of her family, the history of her community, the political background of a rural community in World War II, and the environmental and human contamination and devastation involved in the development and deployment of the first atomic bomb. Throughout the book, Strasser “shows great sensitivity in her research” and attention to her archival and familial sources, taking time to “clearly explain the complexities” of the historical and present repercussions and reverberations of the secrecy of both her family and the nation. Innovative and variegated in its design, readers proclaimed the work “reads like a great mystery” that they “did not want to put down.”  

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 2024 Summer Assembly Season. 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 Kwame Alexander Writers’ Lab & Conference — which convenes writers each June in workshops, panels, and other conversations that draw fruitful and urgent connections between the personal, the political and the craft of writing — 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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