Olufunke Grace Bankole has won the 2026 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, which honors an outstanding debut novel published during the preceding calendar year. Her winning book, The Edge of Water, published by Tin House, is an emotionally resonant story of three generations of Nigerian women, and it explores family ties, religion, diaspora and prophecy.

Bankole will receive the award during a public event at VCU on Nov. 12. The event will involve a reading, a moderated discussion and a Q&A.

Bankole, a Nigerian American writer, is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a recipient of a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship. Her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review and Stand magazine. Bankole won first place in the Glimmer Train Short-Story Award for New Writers, and she was the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her honors include an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, a residency-fellowship from the Anderson Center at Tower View and a Pushcart Special Mention for her writing. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

The VCU Cabell First Novelist Award celebrates the VCU MFA in Creative Writing program’s yearlong novel workshop – the first in the nation and one of the few still in existence. The winning author receives a $5,000 prize and participates in an event, traditionally in person, with two additional panelists, most often the agent and editor of the winning book. The event, open to all, focuses on the creation, publication and promotion of the author’s first novel.