On September 12, 2024—the birthday of the late writer Gabe Hudson—McSweeney’s is honored to announce the winner of the inaugural Gabe Hudson Prize. After Gabe’s sudden passing from complications due to undiagnosed diabetes in November 2023, his mother, Sanchia Semere, made a generous gift to McSweeney’s to establish a prize fund. On September 12, McSweeney will confer the Gabe Hudson Prize, which honors a fiction writer’s second book, published in the United States the year prior, and includes a $10,000 cash award.
The 2024 Gabe Hudson Prize winner is Ayana Mathis for her novel The Unsettled (Knopf, 2023). The Unsettled was also named a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2023, a Best of 2023 by the New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, an Oprah Daily Best Novels of 2023, and a Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2023. The novel was a finalist for the 2024 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. The New York Times calls it “Poignant, heartbreaking."
The selection committee was led by Akhil Sharma, and this year’s judges included Andrew Leland, Yiyun Li, and Gary Shteyngart. The committee was fully independent and selected the shortlist and winner entirely autonomously, without input from McSweeney’s editorial staff. Their mandate was to identify an American writer’s second book-length work of fiction, which embodies the spirit of humor and generosity that Gabe and his work did. The committee’s citation of the novel says, “A story of mothers and children, of migration and homelessness, The Unsettled is both particular in its details and universal in its emotions. Ayana Mathis has written a virtuosic novel where history and geography get folded and then folded again. The effect is of feeling the limits of human agency, and yet also an awareness that grace exists.” The committee also recognized a short list of finalists for the 2024 prize: Blackouts by Justin Torres, Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter.
Mathis’s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie was a New York Times best seller and has been translated into sixteen languages. Mathis’s essays and criticism have been published in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, T Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Guernica. Currently pursuing her Masters of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary, Mathis’s most recent nonfiction explores the intertwining of faith and American literature in her multi-essay New York Times series “Imprinted By Belief.” Mathis is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. She was born in Philadelphia and currently lives in New York City, where she teaches writing in Hunter College’s MFA Program.
Mathis said, “I am immensely grateful to the esteemed members of the jury, to McSweeney’s, and most of all to Sanchia Semere for recognizing The Unsettled with this extraordinary honor. It is the privilege of a lifetime to become part of Gabe’s legacy of generosity, literary community, and artistic excellence as the inaugural recipient of this distinguished award.”
Gabe Hudson was the author of Dear Mr. President (2002, Knopf ), a collection of short stories, which was a PEN/Hemingway award finalist and a winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the Academy of Arts and Letters. Dear Mr. President was translated into seven languages.
Tracy K. Smith, U.S. Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, called Gabe’s second book, a novel titled Gork the Teenage Dragon (2017, Knopf), “a hilarious ride through the mind-bending and capacious universe, a one-of-a-kind coming-of-age story for the big-hearted and beleaguered.”
Gabe received the Adele Steiner Burleson Writing Award at the University of Texas, the John Hawkes Writing Award from Brown University, and the Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. He was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2007.
He taught at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, where he established Yonsei’s first creative writing program. His stories and interviews appeared in numerous publications, including McSweeney’s, where he had been an editor at large. At the time of his passing, he was hosting Kurt Vonnegut Radio, a podcast for writers and their readers.
Gabe served in the Marine Corps Reserves.
Sanchia Semere, the donor who established this award, said, “Gabe, my son, wanted to be a writer from a young age. He was a voracious reader and was friends with many in the writing community, as well as a friend to many who sought his advice on writing. I recall Gabe submitting to McSweeney’s early on and the thrill he experienced when McSweeney’s published a submission. I can think of no better way for Gabe’s name to live on than to establish the Gabe Hudson Prize at McSweeney’s to award writers whose second books exemplify the notions of humor, satire, and the generosity of spirit for which Gabe was known.”
Read an interview with Mathis and Daniel Gumbiner, editor of The Believer.