Isabella Hammad has won the 2025 L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize, given annually to a work of “exceptional fiction,” for Enter Ghost.
Hammad’s novel, published in 2023 by Grove, follows Sonia Nasir, a Palestinian actor living in London who returns to Haifa, Israel, to visit her sister and agrees to perform in a local production of Hamlet in the West Bank. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book “a thorough and thoughtful exploration of the role of art in the political arena.”
The book previously won the Aspen Words Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Stacey Swann, the final judge for the award, praised Hammad’s book as “a deeply moving, brilliantly layered novel” and “an organic whole that is even more than the sum of its parts.”
Shortlisted for the Clark Fiction Prize were The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue and Tom Lake by Ann Patchett.
The Clark Fiction Prize, administered by the English department at Texas State University, was established in 2016 and comes with a $25,000 cash award. Previous winners include Colson Whitehead for The Underground Railroad, Percival Everett for The Trees, and Jamil Jan Kochai for The Haunting of Hajji Hotak.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
