Alumna Ruchika Tomar '12 Wins 2020 PEN/HEMINGWAY

By
Audrey Deng
April 16, 2020

Back in February, we were pleased to announce that three Columbia writers were finalists for the PEN America Literary Award, one of them being alumna Ruchika Tomar '12. We are further pleased to announce that Tomar is this year’s winner of the prestigious 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. Along with this title, Tomar receives a $25,000 prize and a month-long Residency Fellowship at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, a retreat for artists and writers.

This year’s judges for the award were R.O. Kwon, Terese Marie Mailhot, and David L. Ulin, who praised Tomar’s win with the statement: “A Prayer for Travelers by Ruchika Tomar is a remarkable piece of writing, astute in style and structure and also in the story that it tells. Unfolding in a small town in Nevada, it traces the friendship of two women, a relationship that grows complicated until it shatters, and one of the friends disappears. Tomar is an exquisite writer, and A Prayer for Travelers is marked by a deft and deeply rendered sense of place. Even more, the novel pushes back against our preconceptions, shifting fluidly in time to evoke a sense of the floating nature of existence, especially for characters such as these, who find themselves, in nearly every way that matters, having to reckon with what it means to live on the periphery.”

Yellow, orange, and pink book cover

The book has received highly positive reviews from the press as well. The San Francisco Chronicle writes, “Many women will find parallels between the scene and experiences of their own lives.” The New York Times praises Tomar as “a taker of risks [...] like her nervy protagonists”

In response to this achievement, Tomar said, “I’m incredibly grateful to the Hemingway family and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation for the sincere honor of this award, and to PEN America for their tireless advocacy on behalf of writers and international literature.”

Tomar is a writer from California. She holds a BA in English Literature from the University of California Irvine. She has received fellowships from The Center for Fiction, The MacDowell Colony and Vermont Studio Center. A former Stegner Fellow, she is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.

The Awards Ceremony, which usually is open to the public, and takes place at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, won’t be taking place this year due to current concerns of the COVID-19 virus. Their statement reads: “PEN America and the Library are saddened to inform the public that the 2020 Ceremony is postponed until further notice.”