Ed Park to Receive the 2025 Deborah Pease Prize

We are delighted to announce Ed Park, author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Personal Days, and the story collection An Oral History of Atlantis, as the recipient of the 2025 Deborah Pease Prize from A Public Space.

Established in honor of one of A Public Space’s founders, the Deborah Pease Prize honors a figure who has advanced literature and the arts. “Ed Park is one of the most innovative and nimble-minded fiction writers working today,” said A Public Space board member Yiyun Li. “His novels and stories are sharp, playful, and imaginative; full of unexpected turns and astute observations of the absurdities of both historical events and contemporary life. He is also one of the most generous and supportive figures in publishing, as a writer, a reader, an editor, and a critic. The world is lucky to have Ed, and we are lucky to have him among us.”

“Ed has worked both sides of the aisle—as an insightful and inspiring editor and as a writer who experiments in various modes and genres. He is patient as a critic and pyrotechnical as a writer,” noted A Public Space board member Robert Sullivan. “His work is simultaneously astounding and heartfelt. Books and reading are for him ways that community is continually expanded—one of many reasons we are thrilled to honor him with this prize.”

An editor at The Village Voice in the 1990s and one of the founding editors of The Believer in the 2000s, Ed Park has also worked as an editor at The Poetry Foundation, Penguin, and Amazon. The range of his interests and imagination are evident in his criticism: His essays on Charles Portis, The Chicago Manual of Style, Dalkey Archive’s Library of Korean Literature, graphic novels, and more have appeared in such places as The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and Bookforum.

”One of the guiding principles that Deborah Pease instilled at A Public Space is the value of persevering at one's own vision,” said A Public Space editor Brigid Hughes. “Ed has had a part in so many of the defining publications of our era. All while writing his own astonishing fiction and bringing forth multifaceted and ambitious work."

An accomplished writer and poet, Deborah Pease (1943-2014) was an undaunted and loyal supporter of independence in literature. She was dedicated to literary magazines and to singular writers, and a stalwart supporter of countless organizations that serve as pillars of the literary world, including the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses and the Poetry Society of America. She received an award for First Amendment Courage from the American Society of Journalists and Authors in her role as the publisher of The Paris Review.

Previous recipients of the Deborah Pease Prize include Michael Silverblatt, Deborah Treisman, Yiyun Li, and Claire Messud.

The 2025 Deborah Pease Prize will be presented to Ed Park on Monday, October 20 at the Century Association in New York City. The benefit committee includes Thomas and Elizabeth Beller, Samantha Hunt and Joe Hagan, Janice Y. K. Lee, Tod Lippy, Sarah Blakley-Cartwright and Nicolas Party, and Antoine Wilson and Chris Levinson Wilson (in formation).

Tickets to the event, which help to support the work of A Public Space, are available here.

Please join us in October to celebrate the extraordinary Ed Park, and the past, present, and future of independent literature.