Oglethorpe University’s own Professor Jessica Handler has won the 2020 Southern Book Prize for Fiction for her first novel, The Magnetic Girl.

Designed to honor great Southern voices, the Southern Book Prize is awarded by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) to books published in the previous year that are Southern in nature – either by a Southern author, or set in the South, or both.

“What was the best Southern book of the year?”

Nominated by booksellers and selected via a popular vote by Southern booksellers and their customers, the 2020 Southern Book Prize Winners were selected from a list of finalists from ballots submitted by over 1000 Southern readers, representing over 150 Southern independent bookstores.  The chosen books represent the indie answer to the question “What was the best Southern book of the year?”

According to Brian Lampkin of Scuppernong Books, the novel is “a grand, dark, mysterious historical novel filled with dark power and ambivalence. The Magnetic Girl captures a time and place, not only in the life of a teenage girl, but in our country as well. Filled with the shifting longings of adolescence against a vaudeville backdrop, Handler’s novel explores the dangerous journey from childhood to adulthood when our budding powers both enthrall and terrify us.”