Edward Lewis Wallant Award

The Edward Lewis Wallant Award is one of the oldest and most prestigious Jewish literary awards in the United States. It is presented annually to a Jewish writer, preferably unrecognized, whose published creative work of fiction is deemed to have significance for the American Jew.

About the Award

The award was established shortly after the untimely death in December 1962 of Edward Lewis Wallant, gifted author of The Human Season and The Pawnbroker. Dr. and Mrs. Irving Waltman of West Hartford were prompted to create this memorial because of their admiration for Edward Wallant’s literary ability.

A panel of three critics serves as judges, and they seek out a writer whose fiction bears a kinship to the work of Wallant, and preferably an author who is younger and unrecognized. Among those who have received the award in past years are: Ayelet Tsabari, Rebecca Dinerstein, David Bezmozgis, Kenneth Bonert, Joshua Henkin, Edith Pearlman, Julie Orringer, Sara Houghteling, Eileen Pollack, Ehud Havazelet, Leo Litwak, Chaim Potok, Cynthia Ozick, Curt Leviant, Thane Rosenbaum, Myla Goldberg, Jonathan Rosen, and Nicole Krauss.

Wallant Award Anthology

In 2015, the Greenberg Center celebrated the publication of a Wallant Award anthology of past winners and finalists, titled The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction, edited by Victoria Aarons (Trinity University), Mark Shechner (University at Buffalo) and Avinoam Patt (University of Hartford). The New Diaspora, published by Wayne State University Press, brings together under one cover a representative group of those writers whose work has either won or been considered for the award. In recognition of the trajectory and development of American Jewish writing in the 50 years since the award was established, the volume reflects the breadth and ongoing vitality of the fiction written by and about Jews in America. Learn more about The New Diaspora.

2019 Wallant Award Winner

Peter Orner for Maggie Brown & Others

In his sixth book, Maggie Brown & Others, Orner has managed his most sustained achievement yet: 44 stories, many as short as a few paragraphs, none longer than twenty pages. The stories venture from the San Francisco Bay Area to Chicago and Iowa then over to the East Coast, and with them he pairs a poignant novella that delivers not only the joys and travails of a 45-year marriage, but an entire era in a working-class New England city. While recurrent characters appear in different stories and some of the stories are linked, Orner achieves his effects with subtlety, so that part of the pleasure for readers of this collection is in discovery and making the connections that Orner has movingly built into the book. Yet each story can be enjoyed on its own and will leave an indelible mark.

2018 Wallant Award Recipient

2018 Edward Lewis Wallant Award Winner

Eduardo Halfon for Mourning

In Mourning, Eduardo Halfon follows his memory back to his maternal roots in Jewish Poland and to forbidden stories of his father’s Lebanese-Jewish immigrant family. Former Wallant Award winner, Francine Prose, calls Mourning “a feat of literary acrobatics” (New York Review of Books). Mourning has also been described as a subtle and stirring reflection on the formative and destructive power of family mythology, silence, and grief.

Eduardo Halfon was born in Guatemala City and moved to the United States at the age of 10. He attended school in South Florida, studied industrial engineering at North Carolina State University, and returned to Guatemala to teach literature for eight years at Universidad Francisco Marroquín. He is currently a visiting professor in creative writing at the University of Iowa.

Read a conversation with Eduardo Halfon and Mourning translators Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn that was moderated by University of Hartford Adjunct Professor Avinoam Patt and published in The Massachusetts Review.

Past Wallant Award Winners