NEW YORK (AP): Ruchika Tomar's A Prayer for Travelers has won the PEN/Hemingway Award for best debut novel, an honour previously given to Marilynne Robinson, Tommy Orange and Yiyun Li among others.

Currently teaching at Stanford University, Tomar will receive $25,000 and a month-long residency at the Ucross Foundation writers retreat in Wyoming.

PEN/Hemingway judges on Monday called Tomar's narrative of the friendship between two women in a small Nevada town “a remarkable piece of writing, astute in style and structure and also in the story that it tells.”