Edward Lewis Wallant Award

The Edward Lewis Wallant Award is one of the oldest and most prestigious Jewish literary awards in the United States. The annual award recognizes a writer, preferably unrecognized, whose published work of fiction is deemed to have significance for American Jewish history and culture.

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. Irving and Fran Waltman of West Hartford were prompted to create this memorial because of their admiration for Edward Wallant’s literary ability.

A panel of four critics serves as judges. They seek out a writer whose fiction bears a kinship to the work of Wallant. 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.

2025 Wallant Award Recipient

Benjamin Resnick for Next Stop

Benjamin Resnick is the rabbi of the Pelham Jewish Center in New York. Ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, he lives in Pelham with his wife and two children. His non-fiction has appeared in the Washington Post, The Forward, Tablet Magazine, and elsewhere. His first novel, Next Stop, was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize For Jewish Literature. 

In Next Stop, Resnick deploys speculative and fantastical elements including a black hole swallowing Israel, unexplained global anomalies, and dystopian upheaval as powerful metaphors for rupture: the rupture of homeland, the rupture of safety, the rupture of history, the rupture of memory. At the same time, Next Stop remains grounded in the most intimate and human of dramas: a family trying to survive and to love even as the world collapses around them. By blending magical realism, sci-fi, dystopia, and Jewish text, Resnick gives us a Jewish future in which historical patterns of persecution and displacement are refracted through an alternative, deeply uncertain Jewish future, expanding what Jewish fiction can do.

2024 Wallant Award Recipient

Scott Nadelson for Trust Me

Scott Nadelson is the author of two novels, Between You and Me and Trust Me; a memoir, The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life In Progress; and six collections of short fiction, most recently While It Lasts, recipient of the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence. His work has won an Oregon Book Award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize and has been published in venues such as Ploughshares, New England Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and The Best American Short Stories. He teaches at Willamette University, where he holds the Hallie Brown Ford Chair in Writing, and in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program at Pacific Lutheran University. 

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.

Past Wallant Award Winners

Submission Deadline: November 1