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Literary Arts announced the 2025 Oregon Book Award winners last night, April 28, in a ceremony at Portland Center Stage at The Armory, hosted by writer Omar El Akkad. Thirty-five titles by Oregon writers and authors were chosen as finalists by a panel of out-of-state judges. The judges winnowed that list down to winners in seven genre categories, including fiction, poetry, nonfiction, young adult and graphic literature.
Kimberly King Parsons took home the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction for her debut novel, We Were the Universe, which is about a young mother grieving the death of her sister. In its review, The New York Times praised “Parsons’s fearless wit and sizzling depictions of yearning.”
“This book is really filthy and really weird and so I didn’t expect to win,” Parsons said from the Armory stage. “Maybe the takeaway is write the weird thing and write the filthy thing.”
We Were the Universe competed against Survival Tips: Stories by Miriam Gershow, Honey by Victor Lodato, A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest by Charlie J. Stephens, and The Horse by Willy Vlautin.
Parsons praised her fellow authors in the fiction category in her acceptance speech. She also admitted that she was fully unprepared to win and give a speech, other than writing her agent’s name down on her hand in the car on the way to the ceremony “in case everything flies out of my head, which of course it has.”
Rebecca Clarren’s The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance took the general nonfiction award and Jaclyn Moyer’s On Gold Hill: A Personal History of Wheat, Farming, and Family, from Punjab to California won the prize for creative nonfiction.
“It is important to have a cultural organization like Literary Arts that tries to uplift as many diverse stories as possible,” host El Akkad said in a press release. El Akkad is author of, most recently, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This and a two-time OBA winner himself.
The full list of 2025 winners is available here.
