Jacqueline Crooks’ novel Fire Rush won the Pen America Pen Open Book Award 2024 on Wednesday, November 27, 2024.
PEN America Open Book Award (formerly the Beyond Margins Award) is a program intended to foster racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities. The award is given to an exceptional book-length work of any literary genre by an author of color. Previous winners include Helen Oyeyemi, Roxanne Gay, Hafizah Augustus Geter, Divya Victor, Kevin Young, and Nafissa Thompson-Spires.
The 2024 jury, Jenn Baker, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Nina McConigley, and Erika L. Sanchez announced the finalists including Jacqueline Crooks, Soraya Palmer, Ava Chin, and Parini Shroff. Because of the ongoing boycott of Pen America, John Manuel Arias withdrew his entry from consideration. Fire Rush published by Viking and written by Jacqueline Crooks was declared the winner.
Their citation said: “Fire Rush is a brilliant, electrifying debut. The genius of Jacqueline Crooks’s novel lies in the muscular musicality of her writing, which animates every scene and character to vivid, full-bodied effect. The underground dance halls on the outskirts of 1970s and ’80s London hold hypnotic power for Yamaye, a young Jamaican factory worker who spends her weekends immersed in the dub reggae scene and falls in love. Through state violence, brutal loss, and personal and political awakening, music is the viscera that holds the world together. This is a book that pulses with sound, character, and feeling, which is to say that it carries within its pages what it means to be furiously, exquisitely alive.”
Jacqueline Crooks said on social media afterward, “Thrilled to announce that #FireRush 🔥 has won The PEN Open Book Award @penamerica It’s incredible to see the world of the dub reggae scene making waves in the US 🇺🇸Thanks to all the judges and my fantastic editorial team @vikingbooks. Congratulations to all the other nominees. It’s a privilege to be nominated with these authors.”
The 2023 novel comes with the following blurb;
Set amid the Jamaican diaspora in London at the dawn of 1980s, a mesmerizing story of love, loss, and self-discovery that vibrates with the liberating power of music.
Yamaye lives for the weekend, when she goes raving with her friends, the “Tombstone Estate gyals,” at The Crypt, an underground dub reggae club in their industrial town on the outskirts of London. Raised by her distant father after her mother’s disappearance when she was a girl, Yamaye craves the oblivion of sound – a chance to escape into the rhythms of those smoke-filled nights, to discover who she really is in the dance-hall darkness.
When Yamaye meets Moose, a soulful carpenter who shares her Jamaican heritage, a path toward a different kind of future seems to open. But then, Babylon rushes in. In a devastating cascade of violence that pits state power against her loved ones and her community, Yamaye loses everything. Friendless and adrift, she embarks on a dramatic journey of transformation that takes her to the Bristol underworld and, finally, to Jamaica, where past and present collide with explosive consequences.
The unforgettable story of one young woman’s search for home, animated by a ferocity of vision, electrifying music, and the Jamaican spiritual imagination, Fire Rush is a blazing achievement from a brilliant voice in contemporary fiction.
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