Announcing the Winner of the Prize for Fiction

Dzanc Books is pleased to announce the winner of this year’s Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction: The Banana Wars by Alan Grostephan. It was selected from a pool of hundreds of manuscripts and eventually judged by three celebrated Dzanc Books authors: Josip Novakovich (Rubble of Rubles, Honey in the Carcase), Angel Khoury (Between Tides), and Blair Austin (Dioramas), winner of last year’s Prize for Fiction.

Centered on a period of violence in Urabá, Colombia, in the 1990s, when Colombian and American banana producers financed right-wing paramilitaries to cleanse the zone of guerrillas and their supposed collaborators, The Banana Wars follows the lives of four characters pulled into different sides of the conflict. Austin says of the manuscript,

“This is a searing account of the ongoing consequences of colonial power structures in Colombia. What strikes me about The Banana Wars is the keen, journalistic eye and the refusal to look away from the lives and power struggles of everyday people—guerillas, paramilitary soldiers, sex workers, plantation owners and their backers overseas—all of whom are trapped in a brutal system of exploitation and madness.”

Alan Grostephan is the author of Bogotá, a novel chosen by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best ten books of fiction in 2013 and longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. He is also the editor and translator of Stories of Life and Death, a collection of writing by emerging Colombian writers. Grostephan said of winning the prize:

“I set out to write a simple novel, a deathbed confession by an American banana executive. As I researched and developed the book, traveling frequently to Urabá, Colombia, where it is set, everything became much more complex. The history of bananas—where they come from, who plants them, who makes money from them—and why this business is so violent turned my book into a larger drama about people at every level of the trade. People who would never meet in real life, but could share the pages of the book and coexist in a reader’s mind. I am grateful to Dzanc, the perfect home for this book, for understanding and embracing it.”

The Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction 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. For more information, please visit www.dzancbooks.org