Award-winning author and Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Tony Tulathimutte is the inaugural recipient of the Jack Galef Literary Arts Award.

Galef Award ceremony

To celebrate the inaugural Jack Galef Literary Arts Award, the university will host a ceremony and reading at 4 p.m. Sept. 29, at Hancher Auditorium’s Stanley Café.

 

The new literary prize is administered by the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop on behalf of the estate of Jack Galef, an alumnus of the workshop. At $150,000, it is one of the largest literary prizes awarded in the United States.

Tulathimutte, who earned an MFA from Iowa in 2012, is a visiting faculty member in residence at the workshop. Lauded as “the first great millennial novel” by New York Magazine, his 2016 debut, Private Citizens, follows four Stanford University graduates as they navigate their lives and careers in the San Francisco Bay Area in the shadow of the impending Great Recession.

His 2024 short story collection, Rejection — described by author and fellow workshop graduate Carmen Maria Machado as “unrelentingly brutal and gut-bustingly funny” — was longlisted for the National Book Award.

“I feel enormously lucky and grateful to be the inaugural recipient of the Jack Galef Award. I hope I can prove that supporting writers is worthwhile,” says Tulathimutte, also a recipient of a Whiting Award, a prestigious American literary prize awarded annually to 10 emerging writers. “One of the things everybody knows but almost everybody underrates is just how much of an impediment to writing the struggle for a livelihood is.”

The Jack Galef Literary Arts Award will be presented every two years to support a younger writer who has demonstrated great talent or to recognize the work of a more established writer who has been underrecognized. Recipients will be selected by a committee of workshop faculty. 

“It is a privilege for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to present the Jack Galef Literary Arts Award,” says workshop director Lan Samantha Chang. “We are delighted to award the inaugural prize to an iconic writer of pathbreaking fiction.”

Jack L. Galef II graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1967. He taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and his poems have been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Paris Review.

“With this prize, Mr. Galef intended to elevate younger writers with great potential who have done very good work but have not yet been noticed, or to shine a light on writers who are perhaps more mature but whose genius has not been adequately recognized,” says Jane Van Voorhis, assistant vice president at the UI Center for Advancement.