Photograph of Elijah Bailey courtesy of the author; photograph of Julien Columeau by Valentina Kim; photograph of Sana R. Chaudhry by Virginia Hobbs.
We are delighted to announce that Elijah Bailey will receive this year’s George Plimpton Prize and that Julien Columeau and Sana R. Chaudhry will receive the Susannah Hunnewell Prize. The prizes will be presented at our annual Spring Revel on April 1 in New York, cochaired by Laurie and Oskar Eustis and MCed by Lena Dunham. We’ll also be honoring Anne Carson with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature, which will be presented by Ben Whishaw. Prizewinners are selected by the editorial committee of the Review’s board of directors.
The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993, honors our founding editor’s commitment to championing new talent by recognizing an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the magazine during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Jesse Ball, Amie Barrodale, Emma Cline, Isabella Hammad, Yiyun Li, and Ottessa Moshfegh.
Elijah Bailey’s story “Social Promotion,” published in issue no. 247 (Spring 2024), follows a girl who performs in an original, half-improvised school play written for her Great Black Women of History class. Bailey was a John and Renée Grisham Fellow in fiction at the University of Mississippi. The Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson, writes:
“Social Promotion” by Elijah Bailey is laugh-out-loud funny, narrated by Derajanae in a voice full of comedy, pathos, and joy. She is at an awards ceremony at a “last-chance alternative school” in a former office space with “one of them spinning doors you can trap people in,” sitting behind her teacher who makes “a bigger deal out of everything than it is” and next to her mother and baby sister, Racey, who wears a onesie with cars on it. Derajanae has written a play to be performed at the ceremony, but first she has to listen to a boy who can’t read call out the names of the winners. “Sound it out,” she thinks. “Guess better.” He has yet to say her name.
Derajanae got kicked out of her last school “for fighting too good,” and she’s due at the park for a fight right now—but first she has to star in her play as Sojourner Truth. “Me and Miss Marie had to compromise on the play,” she says. “She ain’t want no foul language and no making light of violence. During rehearsal she kept pecking at it and pecking at it until it was only kind of mine.” We watch the play unfold as a raucous farce; naturally, Derajanae manages to make it more hers. During the applause, she thinks, “I had done something big and good, and my ears were burning hot.” But the story isn’t over yet. Keeping the reader in what feels like a gentle suspense until the end, Bailey has the last word, a surprise that resonates in layers—it’s first funny, then more and more profound.
Established in 2023, the Susannah Hunnewell Prize recognizes an outstanding piece of prose or poetry published by the Review in the previous year, and is given in memory of the magazine’s beloved former publisher, who died in 2019. Hunnewell first joined the Review as an intern during George Plimpton’s editorship, and later served as Paris editor before taking on the role of publisher. Among her contributions to the magazine are some of the finest interviews in the Writers at Work series, including conversations with Emmanuel Carrère, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The prize has previously gone to Ishion Hutchinson and Caleb Crain.
In Julien Columeau’s story “Derrida in Lahore,” also published in issue no. 247, an aspiring scholar in Pakistan becomes a deconstructionist zealot. Born in France, Columeau has published five collections of novellas and short stories in Urdu, as well as two novels. “Derrida in Lahore” was translated from the Urdu by Sana R. Chaudhry, who won the 2022 Jawad Memorial Prize for Urdu-English Translation for her translation of Columeau’s story “My Dear Teacher.” Of “Derrida in Lahore,” Simpson writes:
Given the title, readers may come to “Derrida in Lahore” hoping for an autofiction glimpse of the great philosopher (and the story won’t disappoint), but long after the French master has left Lahore, what lingers is the story of two young men, educated together from primary school in the fifteenth-largest city of Pakistan (known for rice production) through university in Lahore. One, Shahid, is a seeker—as a boy he stays in the municipal library until closing time; when he’s driven out of the university for blasphemy, he flees to Paris to attend Derrida’s lectures. The other, our narrator, follows a more conventional path, returning home to teach at a local high school. Shahid’s father, a feudal lord who brags that he’s only ever read one book—the Quran—lures his son home with a post at a Sheikhupura college. The two friends reunite at a hotel where the local literati drink chai, gossip, and grumble. With Derrida looming in the men’s conversations, Columeau deftly renders provincial intellectual life and the search for faith, and creates a pitch-perfect sketch of a celebrity philosopher. His characters call to mind William James’s once- and twice-born believers. There are echoes, too, of Joyce’s “A Little Cloud,” in its bittersweet contrast of deeply serious study with smaller, daily pleasures.
Simpson serves on the editorial committee that selects the prizewinners, along with board directors Kwame Anthony Appiah, William Beekman, Jeffrey Eugenides, Stephen Gaghan, Radhika Jones, Jeanne McCulloch, John McWhorter, Ileene Smith, and Antonio Weiss.
Tickets are still available for the Spring Revel. Writers, artists, and supporters will gather to toast Carson, Bailey, Columeau, and Chaudhry and to raise crucial funds for The Paris Review to continue to seek out and publish extraordinary writing. We hope you’ll join us.
