Kawai Strong Washburn
Kawai Strong Washburn emerged as one of contemporary fiction’s most vital voices with his debut novel Sharks in the Time of Saviors, which captured the 2021 PEN/Hemingway Award. The novel announced a writer of exceptional range and emotional intelligence, one capable of weaving together Hawaiian family saga, magical realism, and penetrating social commentary into a narrative that feels both intimate and expansive. Washburn’s work explores what it means to belong—to place, to family, to a particular cultural legacy—while interrogating the often contradictory forces that shape identity in the modern Pacific.
The PEN/Hemingway recognition, which honors distinguished debut fiction, proved particularly fitting for Washburn’s arrival. Sharks in the Time of Saviors follows a Hawaiian family across generations, braiding together their struggles with poverty, faith, displacement, and the uncanny, all while maintaining a prose style that is at once lyrical and grounded. What distinguishes Washburn’s sensibility is his refusal to treat Hawaiian experience as exotic backdrop; instead, he renders it with the complexity and psychological depth of lived reality. The novel’s cross-generational scope and its willingness to blend the quotidian with the mystical mark him as a writer interested in how ordinary people navigate extraordinary circumstances, particularly within communities whose stories are too often flattened by outside narratives.