The editors of Terrain.org; the Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World; and Texas Tech University Press are delighted to announce the winner of the 2025 Sowell Emerging Writers Prize: Cupido Cupido by Emily Grandy.
Grandy wins $1,000 and publication of her novel by Texas Tech University Press in 2026, as well as a residency of up to two weeks at the Lopez Cottage on the Mackenzie and an additional $1,000 toward travel expenses for the residency courtesy of the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University.
Grandy writes research-driven literary fiction and nonfiction with an ecological focus. Her writing is a celebration of and an invitation to reconnect with the more-than-human world. Her debut novel, Michikusa House (Wayfarer Books, 2023), was awarded the Landmark Prize, the Nautilus Book Award, and was longlisted for the Edna Ferber Book Award. Cupido Cupido will be her second published book.
Cupido Cupido is about Henry Zarlis, who has lived on a remote hilltop in Hale Creek, Kentucky longer than he ever lived in Indonesia. After he breaks his arm in an untimely woodworking accident, his children decide that Henry can no longer manage the work of running a homestead on his own, and that Henry’s grandson, nicknamed Egg, will spend his summer vacation working to get the property ready to sell.
What Egg didn’t expect was to find the house already empty of memorabilia, of anything that predates the birth of his mother except for a single stack of letters written in a language he cannot read dating from the 1950s and 60s. Nor did he expect to make the bewildering discovery of a bird thought to have gone extinct in the 1930s living at the base of his grandfather’s hill. This startling encounter draws a biologist and her team to the property just as Henry’s family is planning to remove him from his homeplace of more than 50 years.
Cupido Cupido will be released in 2026.
Congratulations also to the 2025 Sowell Emerging Writers Prize finalists: Out of Good Ground by John Thomson and The Perpetual Lives of Horace Greenly by Marie Gethins.
Learn more about the Sowell Emerging Writers Prize.
Header photo: Emily Grandy.
