Baton Rouge, LA – The Baton Rouge Area Foundation today announced that Rob Franklin’s debut novel Great Black Hope has won the 19th annual Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, presented annually by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation to support an emerging African American fiction writer. The award honors the late Ernest Gaines, whose stories gave voice to African Americans in rural areas.
A national panel of literary judges selected the winner from 25 eligible entries. Mr. Franklin will receive a $15,000 award to support the continuation of his craft. He will also be honored at a 6 p.m. event at the Manship Theatre in the Shaw Center for the Arts, Baton Rouge, on October 30, 2026 at the annual Award Ceremony.
“I’m thrilled to receive this award and endlessly grateful to the judges panel and to the Gaines family for their support of my work,” said Franklin. “Ernest J. Gaines’s legacy of creativity, chronicling Black American life, and fostering the next generation of young writers is an immense inspiration, and I’m honored to be a part of it.”
Great Black Hope tells the story of Smith,an upwardly mobile and downwardly spiraling Black man caught between worlds of race and class, glamourous parties and sudden consequences, a friend’s mysterious death and his own arrest. A national bestseller, the novel was also nominated for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence — it was named a “Best Book of the Year” by TIME, Vogue, NPR, and Vanity Fair, among others
Franklin is a writer and professor. He has written cover stories for Cultured Magazine, The Cut, and Document Journal. A co-founder of Art for Black Lives, Franklin holds a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from NYU’s Creative Writing program. He teaches writing at School of Visual Arts and edits fiction for Joyland. He lives in New York.
Previous winners of the Ernest J. Gaines Award include: Swift River by Essie Chambers; TEMPLE FOLK by Aaliyah Bilal: Mother Country by Jacinda Townsend; The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris; Everywhere You Don’t Belong by Gabriel Bump; Lot by Bryan Washington; A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley; The Talented Ribkins by Ladee Hubbard; Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson; Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson; The Residue Years by Mitchell S. Jackson; The Cutting Season by Attica Locke; We Are Only Taking What We Need by Stephanie Powell Watts; How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu; Big Machine by Victor Lavalle; Stellar Places by Jeffery Reynard Allen; Like Trees, Walking by Ravi Howard and; A Killing in This Town by Olympia Vernon.
Applications for the 20th annual Gaines Award are now open. Details can be found at ernestjgainesaward.org/criteria.
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About Ernest Gaines: Literary legend Ernest Gaines was a native of Oscar in Louisiana’s Pointe Coupee Parish which served as the setting for many of his novels. During his lifetime, Gaines received a National Medal of Arts Award (2013), a MacArthur Foundation’s Genius Grant, and the National Humanities Medal among numerous others. He was a member of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His critically acclaimed novel “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” was adapted into a made-for-TV movie that won nine Emmy awards. His 1993 novel “A Lesson Before Dying” won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.