Easthampton author Jedediah Berry’s novel “The Naming Song” has received the prize for fiction from the Massachusetts Center for the Book 2025 Book Awards.
Photo credit: Tristan Morgan Chambers
EASTHAMPTON — Local author Jedediah Berry has received the prize for fiction for his latest work as the Massachusetts Center for the Book announced the winners of the 2025 Book Awards.
Berry is being honored for his novel “The Naming Song,” the story of an unnamed courier searching for the truth of the past in a world where words have disappeared.
“I write to make sense of the world, and sometimes this leads me to strange places. I’m grateful that people are connecting with a book about a woman whose closest companions include a ghost, a monster and a nameless beast,” said Berry. “It took me over a decade to finish ‘The Naming Song,’ but I wouldn’t have managed a word without the friends and visionary fantasists who emboldened me to tell the story of a broken world repaired by art and language. I’m honored to have this work recognized by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”
The latest round of winners through the Massachusetts Book Awards celebrates the most outstanding books published in 2024 by Massachusetts authors, artists and poets. This year’s awards mark the inception of two new prizes: the Notable Contribution to Publishing Award, which recognizes the quality of the book as an object — including production standards, printing and design — from a Massachusetts-based publishing, and the Graphic Novel Prize.
“The Mass Book Awards have been celebrating the talents of Bay State authors, illustrators and creators for a quarter century now. This year’s winners inspire and challenge us, they unpack difficult historical truths and shape our understanding of the wild, wonderful and sometimes confusing world that surrounds us. This year’s awards reflect the creativity and vitality of the Massachusetts literary community,” said Courtney Andree, executive director of the Massachusetts Center for the Book.
Berry grew up in the Hudson Valley, New York, around a family of storytellers. From an early age, Berry was the audience for many fairy tales told by his grandmother and many life stories from his “larger than life” uncle’s childhood.
As a young reader, Berry said he was drawn toward the works of Washington Irving and fantastical adventure stories, helping shape what he has focused on as an author.
“Stories like Rip Van Winkle and his other fantastical works gave me this sense of the fantastic being there in the world, that there was this sort of strangeness abroad. And that I think was a big influence too,” said Berry.
Berry eventually moved to Massachusetts for grad school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA program. This is where he said he found his writing community and met so many local writers who inspired — and continue to inspire — him and his work.
“The Naming Song” is Berry’s second novel, and he also has written fictions in other unusual forms including Story-in-Cards, and game writing. He added he is often working between interactive works and more traditional fiction because he grew up playing and running many games with friends.
Berry said “The Naming Song” attempts to connect the stories he has always been in spired by to some of the more of the innovative work out there that has pushed the genre forward.
“‘The Naming Song’ started really as a way I was trying to connect some dots between the stories I’d read as a kid that inspired me, everything from the Alice books, to ‘A Wrinkle in Time,’ all those sort of fantasy adventure stories that I grew up on. I was trying to connect those things to the kind of literary works that I had been reading more recently, but also the really innovative writers who are working in a fantastic vein. Folks like Ursula Le Guinn, and Western Massachusetts’ own John Crowley. These were writers who to me were finding this connection between language and a kind of visionary sense of storytelling.”
Berry continued, “‘The Naming Song’ is all about language, creating or recreating a world through language. It has that sort of classic adventure story model of the books that I loved as a kid combined with this meditation on language and storytelling.”
Berry added, when writing he does not start off with a specific theme in mind and that is something that often discovered in the texture of the writing process. Though, he did add, when writing the story, the power of language was on his mind and that comes through within the story.
“As I wrote, I began to think a lot about the power of language and story to either connect people or to drive them apart. And especially now in a time where I think how people are labeled and how language can be used to drive a wedge between us, I feel all the more sort of urgency to remind people of the power of stories to draw points of connection between us, to bring us together, to make us cohere. That’s something that emerged over time,” said Berry.
He added, “Fantasy for me is a way of stepping a little outside of the world in order to see it more clearly. When I’m writing fantasy, I’m kind of drawing on all these influences from fairy tales to adventure stories to even the epic fantastic works that have come about since Tolkien. But I’m trying to make the reader and myself feel grounded in this fantastical space, to make it feel as real as possible and connected to our world.”
Berry added that even with the fantastical setting of the novel, there is a lot of Western Massachusetts incorporated in the book that folks reading may be able to pick up on. Specifically, there are real life locations of the region featured in the book but they may not be called the same thing as in real life because the book is taking place at a point in which everything is being renamed.
“The thing I have found is that if you want to connect with readers, the best way to do that often is to write for the people closest to you. I think about my family and my friends and in a way im kind of writing for them, and if I can get at the story in a true and honest enough fashion for them, then I know other people will connect with it as well,” said Berry.
Berry said to be honored for his work in this way is “immensely gratifying” after spending a decade of his life working on the book.
“I spent over 10 years on this book and for so long it was this conversation, this quiet conversation I was having with the page. It always feels like, well I’ll put this out into the world now. I have no idea what will happen. I don’t know if anyone will read it or connect with it, so knowing that the judges saw something worthy of this honor was for me this greatly reassuring thing, to know that it’s out there, readers are reading it, and people are understanding what I was up to for all that time. It’s a very happy end to what can be a very lonely process because the writing of course always happens in that very private, quiet space,” said Berry.
He added, “I’m at this moment in my career where I’ve been trying to decide how much can I devote to writing. I’m a relatively new father so my life has changed in all these ways. It’s something I remind myself of now as I’m actually taking a risk to kind of become something closer to a full-time writer, that maybe I can pull this off so it’s a really nice thing.”
The Massachusetts Center for the Book is a nonprofit dedicated to inspiring a love of reading, honoring the rich literary culture of the commonwealth, promoting unrestricted access to books and libraries, foster literacy and learning. Founded in 2000, the Massachusetts Center for the Book is charged with developing, supporting and promoting cultural programming to advance the cause of books, libraries and reading in Massachusetts.
As the designated commonwealth affiliate of the Library of Congress, the center runs youth and family literacy programs, like the Reading Challenge and Letters About Literature, represents Massachusetts at the National Book Festival; operates the Massachusetts Book Awards and Mass Kids Lit Fest; and partners with community organizations on literary initiatives and events, big and small, across the state.
Berry added he is looking forward to socializing and meeting with the many other respected authors at the Massachusetts Book Awards Ceremony on Oct. 7 at the Massachusetts State House. This ceremony marks 25 years of the Massachusetts Book Awards.
“As far as I know, this is the first time that a fantasy novel has won the Massachusetts Book Award for fiction and that for me — my work is standing on the shoulders of generations of extraordinary, visionary, fabulist and fantasists, and so I’m really happy that some of these borders are breaking down where people are kind of reassessing what’s going on in genre fiction and seeing that innovative and exciting work can be done built on those traditions.”
