Poet and translator-turned-novelist Idra Novey has been awarded the 2017 Sami Rohr Prize by the Jewish Book Council for her debut novel, Ways to Disappear. The prize comes with a $100,000 award.

At a ceremony held at the Jewish Museum in New York, Novey was honored, along with the four runners-up: Daniel Torday (The Last Flight of Poxl West), Paul Goldberg (The Yid), Adam Ehrlich Sachs (Inherited Disorders), and Rebecca Schiff (The Bed Moved). Torday received the Choice Award ($18,000), while the other “fellows” received $5,000 each. (Eighteen represents chai, or life, in Judaism, and multiples of 18 are commonly given as gifts and prizes.)

The Sami Rohr Prize alternates between fiction and nonfiction, so this year’s finalists were four novels and one short story collection published in 2015 and 2016.

Ways to Disappear is set in modern Brazil and concerns…