Isabella Hammad’s novel, Enter Ghost, has won the 2025 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.
Isabella Hammad (photo by Kathy Coulter)
“With Enter Ghost, Isabella Hammad has created a deeply moving, brilliantly layered novel,” said Stacey Swann, Clark Prize final judge and author of Olympus, Texas. “The narrator Sonia’s personal history, her career as an actor, her strained relationship with her sister and her evolving relationships with the director and cast of an Arabic-language production of Hamlet all exist within the masterfully-evoked world of both Israel and the West Bank, not as news or historical context but as a lived place deeply intertwined with each of the characters’ lives. Even with these complexities, even with the way Hamlet echoes throughout the plots and subplots, the novel is elegantly seamless, an organic whole that is even more than the sum of its parts.”
A stunning rendering of present-day Palestine, Enter Ghost is a story of diaspora, displacement and the connection to be found in family and shared resistance. Timely, thoughtful and passionate, Hammad’s second novel is an exquisite feat, an unforgettable story of artistry under occupation.
‘Enter Ghost’ Book Cover
Hammad was born in London. Her writing has appeared in publications including Conjunctions, The Paris Review and The New York Times. She was awarded the 2018 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and a 2019 O. Henry Prize. Her first novel, The Parisian (2019), won a Palestine Book Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Betty Trask Award from the Society of Authors in the UK. She was a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, and has received literary fellowships from MacDowell, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Lannan Foundation. She was selected as one of the Granta “Best of Young British Novelists” in 2023.
Texas State will celebrate Hammad and her work on April 9 with a 3-5 p.m. reception, reading, Q&A and book signing in The Wittliff Collections. The event is free and open to the public. The 2025 Clark Prize short list included The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue and Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. Nominations of works published in 2024 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 TXST’s San Marcos 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.
