15 Bytes is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2025 15 Bytes Book Award in Fiction. Presented annually since 2013 by Artists of Utah, the award recognizes outstanding literary achievement by Utah writers or works with significant connections to the state published in the previous year. This year’s fiction finalists traverse immigrant landscapes, mythic corridors, and speculative worlds on the brink of collapse. Together, they reflect the boldness, imagination, and emotional acuity that characterize the region’s contemporary literary culture. We congratulate the finalists and celebrate their contributions to the arts in Utah and beyond. The winner will be announced in mid-December.

Ranjan Adiga — Diversity Quota

In Diversity Quota, Ranjan Adiga presents ten stories that illuminate the emotional, cultural, and existential dislocations experienced by Nepali characters in Nepal and in the United States. His prose is clean, unsentimental, and quietly devastating, revealing the deep emotional undercurrents that run beneath everyday interactions. Whether following a couple navigating the social rituals of “Denver” or an undocumented worker contending with guilt, longing, and racialized suspicion in “Spicy Kitchen,” Adiga shows how migration reshapes the self, exerting pressures that are both intimate and communal.

Across the collection, Adiga sidesteps the familiar arc of the triumphant immigrant narrative and instead offers portraits of individuals negotiating loneliness, aspiration, shame, and resilience. His characters remain vivid in their contradictions, and the emotional clarity with which he renders them gives the book its distinctive power. Diversity Quota is a nuanced, humane contribution to contemporary stories of migration and a meaningful addition to the literary landscape of the Mountain West.

Ranjan Adiga is a Nepali-American writer and Associate Professor of English at Westminster University in Salt Lake City. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, HuffPost, and numerous literary magazines. His work frequently explores migration, identity, and the tensions that arise at the intersections of cultures. Born and raised in Nepal, he came to the United States in 2003. Diversity Quota is his U.S. debut story collection and reflects the clarity, empathy, and cross-cultural insight that characterize his writing.

READ OUR REVIEW OF DIVERSITY QUOTA

David G. Pace — American Trinity: And Other Stories from the Mormon Corridor

In American Trinity, David G. Pace gathers twelve stories that probe the emotional and spiritual terrain of life in “the Mormon Corridor.” The collection engages directly with the cultural myths, expectations, and internal tensions that shape Latter-day Saint experience. The title story, which reimagines the Three Nephites through the voice of a weary, disillusioned translated being named Zed, exemplifies Pace’s ability to use religious mythology to examine belief, doubt, purpose, and narrative itself. Other stories employ realism to depict characters navigating prayer, memory, loss, and the uneasy aftermath of formative religious experiences.

Throughout the collection, touches of magical realism, dry humor, and intimate psychological observation animate Pace’s exploration of a community rarely depicted with such candor and complexity. American Trinity expands the possibilities of Latter-day Saint literature and offers an arresting portrait of people caught between the stories they inherit and the ones they must learn to tell for themselves.

David G. Pace is a writer, editor, and longtime figure in Utah’s literary community. His work has appeared in regional and national publications, and his novel Dream House on Golan Drive was a PEN/Bellwether Prize finalist. Pace frequently writes about the cultural and spiritual dynamics of the Mormon Corridor, and his stories and essays explore themes of identity, belief, and the lingering effects of formative religious narratives. American Trinity is his first story collection.

READ OUR REVIEW OF AMERICAN TRINITY

Lindsey Drager — The Avian Hourglass

Lindsey Drager’s The Avian Hourglass is a formally daring and hauntingly atmospheric novel set in a world trembling at the edge of disappearance. In a small town that might easily be located in Utah—or, perhaps, the last inhabited corner of a shrinking universe—birds have vanished, the stars have dimmed behind polluted air, and time itself appears fragile, slipping away through the novel’s 180 countdown-like sections. At the center is an unnamed narrator, a would-be astronomer and surrogate mother raising triplets whose biological parents never lived to see them. Through her eyes, we experience a universe in which every gesture becomes both intimate and cosmic.

Drager has the rare ability to build an invented world that feels at once precarious and utterly convincing. She populates her conceptual architecture with characters whose humanity radiates through gesture, memory, and quiet resistance, creating the uncanny sensation of observing lives through the lit windows of a house at night. The novel balances speculative vision with emotional realism, ecological grief with personal longing, abstract design with embodied experience.

Lindsey Drager is a novelist and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Utah. She is the author of The Sorrow Proper, The Lost Daughter Collective, and The Archive of Alternate Endings, all known for their experimental forms and lyrical sensibility. Her work frequently explores the intersections of identity, memory, myth, and the body. The Avian Hourglass continues her commitment to formally ambitious, emotionally resonant fiction.

READ OUR REVIEW OF THE AVIAN HOURGLASS

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UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.