Book design by Alex Merto; Photo of Bump by Jeremy Handrup
“If there’s one thing wrong with people, it’s that no one remembers the shit that they should, and everyone remembers the shit that doesn’t matter for shit.” From the very first line of his debut novel, Everywhere You Don’t Belong, author Gabriel Bump establishes his characters’ matter-of-factness about the world around them; they see things exactly for what they are, no more and no less.
The twenty-nine-year-old author is the newest recipient of the esteemed Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Now in its fourteenth year, the highly- lauded award is given to promising young African-American fiction writers and includes a $15,000 prize donated by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, honoring Louisiana literary legend Ernest Gaines and his contributions to the Black canon. Gaines died last year at the age of eighty-six.
The endearing, nearly painfully-relatable protagonist of Everywhere You Don’t Belong is Claude McKay Love, a young man living with his grandmother on the South Shore during the 1990s. Claude navigates issues of love, family, neighborhood violence, and peer pressure as he tries to figure out how he fits into the world and where he belongs “in the grand scheme of things,” according to Bump.
Past recipients of the award include celebrated writers like last year’s Bryan Washington, Mitchell S. Jackson, and more. “I personally am just a huge fan of most of the writers who have won it, so being in that company means a lot to me personally,” said Bump. “Probably separate from any award that’s out there, this one means the most to me.”
Presented as a coming-of-age love story slash dark comedy, Bump’s prose is simple yet tender, dry without being detached as Claude explores the titular theme of belonging. There’s an element of reality (not realism) in Bump’s narrative structure that seems to reflect his own upbringing on Chicago’s South Side, lending a distinctive legitimacy and veracity to his cast of characters and their dialogue. In one scene, Claude’s neighborhood erupts into a riot after a police shooting occurs, which may feel especially resonant after a tumultuous year for race in America. People like to focus on this scene as being prescient, Bump said, but he wrote that section five years ago, in the wake of the unrest in Ferguson. For Bump, the Ernest J. Gaines award is particularly meaningful because it not only focuses on plot, as a Black story, but also the craft of fiction itself as the judging committee examines the work on a more granular level, he said.
“I think that means a lot to me because I feel that, especially for debut writers like myself, when you enter the world you’re kind of forced to explain yourself as a Black writer, and you’re forced to focus on race and so one of the many things I think is cool about this award is that the storytelling is not necessarily the most important part of the story.”
Bump is already at work on his second novel, The New Naturals, expected in 2022. The award will be presented to Bump at 6:30 p.m. on January 28, 2021 during a live virtual presentation.
