2024/25 Winner & Finalists

 Winner: Highway Thirteen by Fiona McFarlane

Fiona McFarlane is the author of The Night Guest (2013) and The High Places (2016), which won the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Her short fiction has been published in The New Yorker and Zoetrope: All-Story. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Finalist: There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes Jr.

Ruben Reyes Jr. is the son of two Salvadoran immigrants and the author of There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Harvard College, his writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. Originally from Southern California, he now lives in Brooklyn.

Finalist: Ghost Pains by Jessi Jezewska Stevens

Jessi Jezewska Stevens is the author of the novels The Exhibition of Persephone Q (2020), named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and The Visitors (2022). Ghost Pains was chosen as a best book of 2024 by Kirkus Reviews and LitHub. Her reporting on climate and politics appears regularly in Foreign Policy. She also writes essays, criticism, and fiction for The Nation, The New Yorker online, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Bookforum, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in Mathematics from Middlebury College and an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. She currently teaches creative writing at Universität Zürich.

The Story Prize Spotlight Award: The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck

We’re pleased to announce the 13th winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award, The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck (Viking). This beautifully written collection takes an original approach to connecting the stories—all set in New England and ranging in time from 1796 to the present—ordering them according to a traditional eighteenth-century rhyme scheme, with the first and last stories framing five other matched pairs and the collection as a whole.

Ben Shattuck is the author of Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, which was a New Yorker Best Book of 2022, a Wall Street Journal Best Book of Spring, a New York Times Best Book of Summer, a New England Indie Bestseller, and was nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and a Pushcart Prize. He lives with his wife and daughter on the coast of Massachusetts, where he owns and runs the oldest general store in America, built in 1793. He is also the director and founder of the Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency.

The 2024/25 Story Prize Judges

• Writer and editor Elliott Holt

• Writer Maurice Carlos Ruffin

• Bookseller Lucy Yu