Novelist Ruchika Tomar is the winner of the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, for A Prayer for Travelers.

The PEN/Hemingway Award honors a novel of exceptional merit by an American author who has not previously published a full-length book of fiction.

In their citation, the award judges said, “Tomar is an exquisite writer, and A Prayer for Travelers is marked by a deft and deeply rendered sense of place. Even more, the novel pushes back against our preconceptions, shifting fluidly in time to evoke a sense of the floating nature of existence, especially for characters such as these, who find themselves, in nearly every way that matters, having to reckon with what it means to live on the periphery.”