Jamil Jan Kochai wins 2024 Clark Fiction Prize for ‘The Haunting of Hajji Hotak’

Jamil Jan Kochai’s story collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, has won the 2024 L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize. The $25,000 prize—one of the largest literary awards in the United States—recognizes exceptional fiction written in the previous year. 

Since 2016, Texas State’s Department of English has administered the award in celebration of the Clarks’ lifelong contributions to, and love for, literature and the arts. 

“The powerful short stories in The Haunting of Hajji Hotak feel wholly inventive and new while being rooted in an elegant literary tradition,” said Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Clark Prize final judge, author of Sabrina & Corina and the Texas State MFA Program’s university endowed chair. “Jamil Jan Kochai populates each story with characters so vibrant and unrestrained they could leap from the page and take a seat beside you. The prose is stylish and clear, giving life to these incredible stories filled with heart, humor, and, most notably, deep, deep humanity.” 

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak is a moving exploration of characters grappling with the ghosts of war and displacement—with stories that speak to the immediate political landscape of the world today. Kochai ​breathes life into his contemporary Afghan characters, moving between modern-day Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora in America. 

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award and a winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize. Kochai’s debut novel, 99 Nights in Logar, was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories. His essays have been published in The New Yorker, New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Kochai was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches creative writing at California State University, Sacramento.

Texas State will celebrate Kochai and his work on April 9 with a 3:30-5:30 p.m. reading, Q&A and book signing in The Wittliff Collections. The 2024 Clark Prize short list included Glory: A Novel by NoViolet Bulawayo and Trust by Hernan Diaz. Nominations of works published in 2023 were solicited from 12 prominent writers on the condition of anonymity, and the permanent fiction faculty of the Texas State MFA Program narrowed those nominations down to the short list. 

About the L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Literary Endowment

L.D. and Laverne Harrell Clark donated their home and other property to Texas State in 2009 to create an endowment to support writers-in-residence. The Clark Literary Endowment funds the annual L.D. and Laverne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize, which is among the most generous fiction prizes in the country. It also funds a writers-in-residence program that offers one-year residencies to graduates of the Texas State MFA program at the Clarks’ historic home on Main Street in Smithville, 55 miles east of the Texas State campus. The Department of English and MFA Program in Creative Writing within the College of Liberal Arts sponsor the writers-in-residence program. The endowment also funds numerous scholarships for Texas State MFA students. 

For more information, visit www.english.txstate.edu/clarkfictionprize.html.