Announcing the Winner of the 2025 Dzanc nonfiction prize
Dzanc Books is pleased to announce the winner of the 2025 Dzanc Books Nonfiction Prize: Ghost Maps by Annalisa Bolin. In addition to publication by Dzanc in Spring 2027, the prize also comes with a $1,500 advance.
Opening in the wake of Rwanda’s genocide and charting a path through German museum collections, the Virgin Islands, and the legacy of archaeology's brutal colonial history, Ghost Maps traces both what violence leaves behind and the tactile, emotional experience of handling its remains, revealing that the privilege of touching history is a haunting that takes as much as it gives.
“From the first chapter, Ghost Maps left me reeling,” said Michelle Dotter, Dzanc’s publisher and editor-in-chief. “This is not merely a historical account, an invitation to fit our feet into those footprints left in the dust. What Annalisa Bolin accomplishes is rarer: braiding history with sense memory, so that you feel as if you’re standing right beside her, breathing the same air. Bolin explores both the work of an archaeologist and the legacies of that discipline, and she doesn’t shy away from the moments it isn’t pretty.”
Trained as an archaeologist and anthropologist, Annalisa Bolin has lived and worked in Rwanda, northern Europe, the US Virgin Islands, and elsewhere. After receiving a PhD from Stanford University and undertaking postdoctoral fellowships at Linnaeus University (Sweden) and Aarhus University (Denmark), she is a Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Bolin’s nonfiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, Longreads, Sapiens Magazine, Tampa Review, and other venues.
“Ghost Maps is the culmination of more than fifteen years spent among the remains of the past,” Bolin said. “I knew it would require a publisher willing to take risks, and I’m both thrilled and grateful that it’s found a home with Dzanc. I hope the book transports readers in the same way I have been transported—into archaeology’s double life in double time, halfway between the living and the dead.”
The Dzanc Nonfiction Prize was created to recognize daring, original, and innovative writing. Dzanc Books is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization not only committed to producing quality literary works but providing creative writing instruction in public schools through the Dzanc Writers-in-Residence program and offering low-cost workshops for aspiring authors. Dzanc Books also runs annual prizes for the novel and nonfiction. For more information on the house, upcoming titles, and other prize winners, please visit www.dzancbooks.org.