Contest and Scholarship Winners

2024 DISQUIET Prize Winners

DISQUIET International is thrilled to announce the winners in each genre, for our 2024 Literary Prize, in partnership with Granta, Ninth Letter, and The Common. Each winner receives publication and a full tuition scholarship to attend Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. One grand prize winner will also recieve accomodations and a travel stipend. Thanks so much to all who entered!

Nonfiction and Grand Prize Winner: “How to Gut a Fish” by N.C. Happe

(will be published in NinthLetter.com)

N.C. Happe is an emerging memoirist currently residing in Chicago. Her most recent work can be found in Guernica.

Nonfiction finalists:

Susan Li
Robin Luce Martin
Nicole Danielle Morris
Veronica Vo

Fiction Winner: “Reportage” by Elisa Gonzalez

(will be published in Granta.com)

Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her work appears in the New Yorker, Paris Review and elsewhere. A graduate of Yale University and the New York University M.F.A. program, she has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Rolex Foundation, and the U.S. Fulbright Program. She is the recipient of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Her debut poetry collection, Grand Tour, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who will also bring out her novel, The Awakenings, and a nonfiction book, Strangers on Earth.

Fiction finalists:

Tochukwu Okafor
Claire Oleson

Poetry Winner: “Iqra” by Iqra Khan

(will be published in The Common)

Iqra Khan is a Pushcart-nominated poet, activist, and lawyer. She is a winner of the Frontier Global Poetry Prize 2022. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Southeast Review, Adroit Journal, Swamp Pink, Puerto del Sol, The Rumpus, Pidgeonholes, Apogee, Four Way Review, HAD, Palette Poetry, Baltimore Review, among others. Her work is centred around collective nostalgia and the aspirations of her endangered community.

Poetry finalists:

Alan Baer
Carson Wolfe
Mackenzie Berry
Rebecca Myers
Noelani Piters

Luso-American Fellowship Winners

With special thanks to our partner Fundação Luso-Americana, Disquiet is proud to offer these fellowships to writers of Luso descent. All winners will receive free accommodation, travel stipend, and tuition for the 2024 Disquiet program in Lisbon.

Winner: Marina Carreira

Marina Carreira (she/they) is a queer Luso-American multidisciplinary artist from Newark, NJ. She is the author of Desgracada (Bottlecap Press, 2023), Tanto Tanto (Cavankerry Press, 2022), Save the Bathwater (Get Fresh Books, 2018), and I Sing To That Bird Knowing It Won’t Sing Back (Finishing Line Press, 2017). She has exhibited her art at the Newark Museum, Morris Museum, ArtFront Galleries, Monmouth University Center for the Arts, among others. Find her on Instagram at @savethebathewater.

Juliet McShannon

Juliet McShannon is an emerging fiction writer who was born in England, raised in South Africa where she practiced law, and now lives in the Colorado Desert in Southern California. She is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and is an alumna of the Disquiet International Literary Program. Her writing has appeared in the New England Review, Five Points Literary Journal, The Guardian, The Independent, The Star, and elsewhere.

Winner: Lee Santos Silva

Lee Santos Silva is a Professor in the English Department at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston. He is also the former Director of the College’s Center for Equity and Cultural Wealth. The son of Cape Verdean immigrants, Lee was raised in Brockton, MA, which is home to one of the largest Cape Verdean communities outside of Cape Verde. His writing explores issues and intersections of race, national identity, and sexuality in American, Portuguese, and Cape Verdean contexts. He is currently working on a memoir. When he’s not writing, you can find him at the local circus school practicing hand balancing and contortion.

Winner: Sam Simas

Sam Simas is a queer Luso-American writer and translator. His work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Copper Nickel, Southern Indiana Review, Hunger Mountain, Puerto del Sol, Sycamore Review, and other literary magazines; his writing has been nominated for several awards and has won Copper Nickel’s Editor’s Prize for Prose, as well as first-place in CRAFT Literary’s First Chapters Contest. He is a PhD student in Creative Writing (fiction) at the University of Cincinnati and the fiction editor for the Ocean State Review.

Luso-American Fellowship Finalists:

Rose Angelina Baptista
Lissa Batista
M.P. Carver
Thereza Dos Santos
Michael Medeiros
Camila Santos
Ana Cristina Hsu Silva
Gabriella Souza
Flávia Stefani

Other Scholarships and Fellowships

Thanks to the generosity of our donors, up to three full scholarships will be awarded, each honoring a writer whose work and life has shaped the DISQUIET program. More information soon on the winners!

The Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen Scholarship:
Susan Li (nonfiction)

Susan Li is a Chinese American writer with ancestral roots in Toisan. Her nonfiction has earned an honorable mention in the Gulf Coast Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, was a finalist in The Sewanee Review Nonfiction Contest, and has been supported by the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Tin House Summer Workshop, and Roots. Wounds. Words. She lives in New York City.

The Denis Johnson “Stagaya” Scholarship:
Kathryn Hargett-Hsu (poetry)

Kathryn Hargett-Hsu 徐凯蒂 is the author of Good Listener (2024), winner of the Frontier Poetry Breakthrough Chapbook Contest. She is Senior Poetry Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, where she received her MFA in Writing. Born and raised in Alabama, she is the recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, Fine Arts Work Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets, and Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. Most recently, she received the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Lynda Hull Memorial Prize. Find her in Poetry Daily, Best New Poets, Pleiades, The Hopkins Review, swamp pink, Sixth Finch, Diode Poetry Journal, Arts & Letters, Muzzle Magazine, The Margins, Hayden’s Ferry Review, TaiwaneseAmerican.org, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere.

The Flowers Fellowship

Bryan Byrdlong (poetry)

Bryan Byrdlong is a Black poet from Chicago, Illinois. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Helen Zell Writers Program. He has been published in Guernica Magazine, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry Magazine, among others. Bryan received a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. His debut book Strange Flowers is forthcoming from Yes Yes Books. He is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at USC in Los Angeles.