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Gunty wins inaugural Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize for 'exquisite' novel The Rabbit Hutch
Tess Gunty has won the inaugural £5,000 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize for her “exquisite” book The Rabbit Hutch (Oneworld), touted as “the next great American novel” by booksellers.
Gunty was named the winner at an evening ceremony at the Waterstones flagship store in London Piccadilly on 25th August, seeing off competition from Bonnie Garmus, Eloghosa Osunde, Louise Kennedy, Sequoia Nagamatsu and Tara M Stringfellow.
Her book describes the lives of the residents of the Rabbit Hutch, an affordable housing complex in a decaying Rust Belt town. It deals with the care system, urbanisation, poverty and gentrification but it is also a book about one girl’s coming of age, with the odds stacked against her, and finding family and community in the unlikeliest of places.
Having grown up in a Rust Belt town, Gunty was inspired to write The Rabbit Hutch because she had never seen a city like hers represented in fiction. She said: “As I grew up, this seemed like a good reason to set my writing—unapologetically, ecstatically—in the post-industrial Midwest. Enraged by the structural mistreatment that generated so much needless violence and desperation, I began to realise that the story of my town was the story of countless towns across the Midwest, across America, across the world.”
She added: “This novel is my effort to reclaim a place derided as ‘flyover country,’ a place dismissed as unsophisticated and luckless, small-minded and pitiable, boring and ugly and irrelevant. A city that is, in fact, infinite cities. I want to insist that these homes and their people are worthy of attention. It is an ode to the forgotten, the lonely and the dispossessed. Above all, The Rabbit Hutch is a secular prayer for the souls trapped in earthly purgatories, an attempt to liberate myself and others from the waiting room. I hope it offers an occasion to laugh, to think and to feel less alone. I hope it delivers you, as it delivered me, into a more compassionate and luminous place.”
The new Waterstones prize was launched earlier this year and is voted for by the chain’s booksellers. The winner receives £5,000 and the backing of all Waterstones shops.
Bea Carvalho, Waterstones head of fiction, said: “We are delighted to announce Tess Gunty as the inaugural winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. The Rabbit Hutch truly has the feel of the next great American novel: it is an exquisite, triumphant book which at once recalls the very best of the contemporary canon while remaining fiercely original and innovative.
"Gunty has written an astonishingly moving, important dissection of gentrification, urbanisation and the care system, tackling serious topics with warmth and wit. Above all, it is a true page-turning delight to read, reread and recommend. Booksellers were blown away by Gunty’s playfulness, her boundless compassion and vast emotional intellect: this is boundary-pushing, daring fiction and we are hugely excited to see what this talented author does next."
