Eugene Lim named winner of the 44th Dos Passos Prize for Literature

"Eugene Lim's work is completely unique in its formal innovations and its elegant yet accessible prose," said Dr. David Magill, professor of literatures of diversity and chair of the Department of English and Modern Languages at Longwood. "Lim manages to pack so much into every page, taking us on a wild journey of adventure with each sentence. He is breathtakingly original and a writer not to be missed."

Lim's work has been described as elegant, whimsical and profoundly moving. In a 2023 interview published by Another Chicago Magazine, writer Ru Marshall described Lim as "employing nimble mashups of philosophy, genre fiction and keen sociological observation," giving him a reputation as "one of experimental fiction's most dazzling practitioners."

The John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, the oldest literary award given by a Virginia college or university, honors a writer whose work offers incisive and original insights into American themes while encompassing a wide range of human experience. The 2025 Dos Passos Prize selection jury comprised last year's winner, novelist Angie Cruz; Rone Shavers, associate professor of English at the University of Utah; and Magill, who serves as chair of the jury.

"Eugene Lim explores deeply emotional situations and themes in an entirely heady, novel way," Shavers said. "There's an impressive, subtle interconnectivity to his books and subjects that, like some kind of literary earworm, will have you thinking about them long after you finish. And on a sentence-by-sentence level, the writing is simply gorgeous."

Lim's writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Believer, The Baffler, Granta, Triple Canopy, Dazed, Little Star, The Denver Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, Your Impossible Voice and Vestiges, among others. He has taught at Columbia University, Long Island University and Queens College. He is currently the librarian at Hunter College High School and serves as managing editor and publisher of Ellipsis Press, a publisher of innovative fiction. He lives in Jackson Heights, New York.

The first John Dos Passos Award was given in 1980. Since that time, winners have included Shelby Foote (1988), Earnest J. Gaines (1993), Maxine Hong Kingston (1998), Colson Whitehead (2012), Ruth Ozeki (2014), Paul Beatty (2015), Karen Tei Yamashita (2018) and Rabih Alameddine (2019). Many of the past recipients have gone on to garner further acclaim. Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017 for The Underground Railroad and in 2020 for The Nickel Boys, and Beatty won the prestigious Booker Prize for Fiction in 2016 for his novel The Sellout. Last year, Alameddine won the National Book Award for fiction for his novel The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother).