8 Award-Winning Literary Fiction Books You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

The Barbellion Prize, founded in 2020, is a literary award dedicated to celebrating and uplifting disabled literature. The 2021 winner is this contemplative novel about the relationship between a deaf child and her grandmother. The two of them build their own language, using elements of sign language as well as their own home signs, facial expressions, and movement. It’s a quiet coming-of-age story, an ode to the natural world, and a beautiful exploration of what it means to belong to someone or someplace.

In these interconnected short stories, Mimi Lok delves into the lives of diasporic women, set in a variety of places and time periods, from California to the UK to Hong Kong. Themes of isolation, loneliness, migration, history, womanhood, and the search for meaningful connection reverberate throughout the whole collection. If you’re a fan of short fiction, this is one not to miss.

When was the last time you read a novel in verse about a group of trans women in Brooklyn? Probably never! This creative and deeply moving novel is a loose retelling of the Russian novel Eugene Onegin, though many of its concerns are decidedly 21st century: cancel culture, generational differences in activist movements, city life, what it means to belong to an identity-based community. It’s both a juicy, gossipy drama about friendships, fallouts, and hookups, and a nuanced look at healing, trauma, and public and private accountability.

If you’re the kind of reader who loves books where cities are their own characters, this is a must-read novel. It follows Sahadevan, a young man living in Delhi, as he lives through crisis after crisis, both personal and global, from the 1960s through the 1980s. Interspersed with Sahadevan’s story are the stories of many other characters — artists, students, activists, and others — who are all caught up in the shifting political currents of a complicated city.

This is one of those books that I recommend to just about everyone, and yet it still seems to have flown somewhat under the radar. It’s funny, tender, wise, playful, and full of hope, despite the heavy subject matter. Mina is a trans Lebanese American doctor who decides to spend some time volunteering at refugee camps on Lesbos. While there, she reconnects with her brother, meets a famous novelist, and reflects on the challenges and joys of her own life. It’s meditative but deeply human book.

I’m starting to think that prize-winning story collections and novels-in-stories don’t get the same attention as prize-winning novels because there are so many brilliant ones on this list with disappointingly few Goodreads ratings! This one focuses on a collection of characters in London, many of them queer, and many of them living on the fringes, doing whatever it takes to survive. It’s a kaleidoscopic and refreshingly frank look at contemporary urban life.

This is another novel-in-stories, this one set in a fictional town in Trinidad. Mohammed writes through and around several events and acts of violence, exploring them from different perspectives and points of view. The result is a portrait of a town that is disturbing, vibrant, and full of contradictions. This is often a difficult book to read, as Mohammed faces trauma and legacies of violence head-on, but it is both impactful and moving.

Set in 1957 at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, this novel follows Alice Young, who leaves home to begin life in New Jessup, an all-Black town in Alabama that has rejected the idea that integration will lead to liberation. Life in New Jessup is full of complications, especially when Alice falls for a young activist whose beliefs don’t always align with those held by the town’s leadership. This is a beautifully written and thought-provoking debut.