Continental Drift: Stories by Tim Bascom (Mint Hill Books) has won the $1,000 2026 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Fiction, sponsored by Washburn University's Center for Kansas Studies, the Thomas Fox Averill Kansas Studies Collection at the University Library and the Friends of the Library. The award will be presented September 24, the day before the annual Kansas Book Festival on the Washburn University campus.
Judge Catherine Browder wrote, "In Continental Drift, writer Tim Bascom has given us a book that matters. Set largely in Africa, or a foreigner's United States, the characters in these stories encounter their own foreignness as Western culture clashes with an African understanding of the world. In pitch-perfect dialogue and sensual language, Bascom's people--whether Ethiopian, South Sudanese, South African, Kenyan or American--come alive through pivotal moments, often unsettling, that will shape their understanding of the world. These are memorable stories from a talented writer, a work of fiction that fulfills what the writer John Gardner once defined as the moral responsibility of Art--to explore and rediscover our values and humanness."