Sowell Emerging Writers Prize

An abandoned place, a disheveled person, a shabby or deteriorating state: we describe such ruin colloquially as "going to seed." But gardeners will protest: going to seed as idle? No, plants are sending out compressed packets filled with the energy needed to sow new life. A pause from flowering gives a chance for the seeds to form. In a time of urgent environmental change, of pressing social injustice, and of ever-advancing technologies and global connections, we often respond with acceleration-a speeding up and scaling up of our strategies to counter the damage and destruction around us. But what if we take the seeds as a starting point: what might we learn about work, sustainability, and relationships on this beleaguered planet if we slowed down, stepped back, and held off? Going to Seed explores questions of idleness, considering the labour both of humans and of the myriad other inhabitants of the world. Drawing on science, literature, poetry, and personal observation, these winding and sometimes playful essays pay attention to the exertions and activities of the other-than-human lives that are usually excluded from our built and settled spaces, asking whose work and what kinds of work might be needed for a more just future for all.

When sixteen-year-old Ignatius "Egg" Girard is told he'll be spending the next three months on his estranged grandfather's failing farm in Hale Creek, Kentucky, getting the place ready to sell, he foresees chores, isolation, and the erosion of everything he'd planned for his summer vacation. At first, Egg is resolved simply to endure: the scorching, tedious days; his grandfather's silences punctuated by harsh outbursts. But then Egg makes two bewildering discoveries. Hidden away in his mother's childhood bedroom, he unearths a bundle of decades-old letters written in a language he cannot decipher. When he shows them to his grandfather, the reaction is immediate and unsettling: the letters are thrown away without explanation. Then there's the startling encounter with a secretive ground-dwelling bird thought to have gone extinct in the 1930s, drawing a biologist and her team to the property just as it's about to be put up for sale. Blending dry humor with emotional depth, Cupido Cupido navigates family estrangement, cultural inheritance, and the complex act of growing up. As Egg wrestles with questions of identity and legacy, the farm becomes a place of unlikely discoveries-about the people who raised him, the profound weight of their shared histories, and the unspoken ways love persists through distance and time. Likely to appeal to readers of Ann Patchett, Celeste Ng, and Kazuo Ishiguro, Emily Grandy's Cupido Cupido is a quietly powerful exploration of memory, belonging, and the fine line between what is lost and what might yet be found.