The Center for Fiction Announces the 2026 First Novel Prize Shortlist
We’re thrilled to share that Samantha Josephs’ CARRYING (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) has been shortlisted for The Center for Fiction 2026 First Novel Prize!
Inaugurated in 2006, the First Novel Prize honors the best debut novel of the year and supports emerging voices in contemporary fiction. This year’s seven-title shortlist was selected from the longlist by judges R. O. Kwon, Kiese Laymon, Jordy Rosenberg, and Danzy Senna.
Each year, The Center for Fiction awards the winning author a $15,000 prize, while each shortlisted author receives a $1,000 prize. This year’s shortlisted authors will read from their work at The Center for Fiction First Novel Fête on Friday, December 4, and the winner will be announced at The Center’s Annual Awards Benefit in New York City on Tuesday, December 8.
Congratulations to Samantha Josephs, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, and all of the people who played a part in bringing this title to life!
Our Shortlisted Title
She’s serving.
She’s eating.
She’s . . . Carrying.
In this electrifying horror debut that’s equal parts funny and harrowing, a stealth trans woman desperate to maintain her picture-perfect life discovers that she’s seemingly—impossibly—pregnant.
Everything Martha’s wanted, she’s made for herself.
Meet Martha: perfect wife, perfect stepmother, perfect woman. She’s got an adoring husband who wants more kids with her, a loving stepdaughter who looks up to her, and a body to die for. She’s an absolute pro: Salon-quality blowouts at home? Done. Perfectly plated meals on the table every day? Effortless. Meticulously faked miscarriages so her husband won’t suspect the truth? Just hand over the Oscar now.
Martha is trans, so stealth even her family has no idea. She carved the woman she is out of the marble of a boy, and she’ll do whatever it takes to protect what she’s built. When a mysterious chronic illness and its debilitating symptoms threaten to upend her existence, she starts experimental treatments and gives in to her surprising, unsettling cravings. She’s even more shocked to discover that she’s undeniably, impossibly pregnant.
With her body changing rapidly outside of her control and her choices dwindling, Martha struggles to maintain the life she’s fought so hard to live while preparing for the motherhood she never thought she’d have.
We’d also like to congratulate our shortlisted PRHPS client title authors!
In this unforgettable debut, a moment of metaphysical transformation launches a woman’s beautiful and terrifying journey through her twenties, through loneliness and complicated love that takes her from the depths of the Pacific Ocean to the plains of Texas
A REAL ANIMAL follows Lucy through the decade dividing college and real adulthood, as she navigates three distinct romantic relationships, reckons with the false promise of family intimacy, and seeks connection with the sublime and natural worlds. Lucy wants her life to be extraordinary. But this desire never seems to graft easily onto the smallness of her world. As a senior in college struggling to quell the destructive effects of a sexual assault, she gets a glimpse of a different plane of existence—more wild, physical, animal. She moves away from home, breaks up with her long term boyfriend, stops speaking to her mother, and starts dating a complicated, violent man.
In Avigayl Sharp’s brilliant and bold debut novel, Offseason, our fiercely observant but self-deluded narrator finds herself teaching at an all-girls boarding school on the Eastern Seaboard. In between manic lectures that veer from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House to the childhood maltreatment of her beloved Iosif Stalin and the generational legacy of the Holocaust, she consorts and canoodles with the town’s locals—including the possibly disgraced male teacher whose job she’s taken over—implicating everyone she meets in her obsessive quest to pin down where, exactly, her own life went wrong.