THE STORY PRIZE FINALISTS FOR BOOKS PUBLISHED IN 2025 ARE ANDRÉ ALEXIS, LYDIA MILLET, AND AYŞEGÜL SAVAŞ
The Story Prize, now in its 22nd year, is pleased to honor as its finalists three outstanding short story collections chosen from 114 submissions representing 72 different publishers or imprints:
Other Worlds by André Alexis (FSG Originals)
Atavists by Lydia Millet (W.W. Norton & Company)
Long Distance by Ayşegül Savaş (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Other Worlds employs fanciful and formally inventive narratives to deftly explore issues of culture, race, sex, and class. Atavists charts a constellation of characters in a Los Angeles-area town, delineating contemporary anxieties, ambitions, and mores with a cool but sympathetic eye. The elegant stories in Long Distance—set in locales such as Paris, Rome, Istanbul, and Marseilles—subtly and poignantly depict the inner lives of characters struggling with displacement despite having chosen it.
Our three judges—writer and copyeditor Benjamin Dreyer, writer and winner of The Story Prize Ling Ma, and Chicago librarian Stephen Sposato—will determine the winner.
On March 31, The Story Prize will livestream a private event that will feature readings by and interviews with each of the three finalists, culminating in the announcement of the winner, who will receive $20,000 and an engraved silver bowl. The two runners-up will each receive $5,000. A link to the livestream will be available via The Story Prize website and social media.
About The Authors
Photo by Thecia K. Alexis
André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. His novel, Fifteen Dogs, won the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His other books include Pastoral, Asylum, Beauty and Sadness, Ingrid & the Wolf, Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa, and Lambton, Kent and Other Vistas: A Play.
Ivory Orchard Photography
Lydia Millet is the author of A Children’s Bible, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top Ten book of the Year. Her first work of short fiction, Love in Infant Monkeys, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She lives outside Tucson, Arizona.
Photo by Maks Ovsjanikov
Ayşegül Savaş is the author of the novels The Anthropologists, White on White, and Walking on the Ceiling; the story collection Long Distance; and the nonfiction book The Wilderness. Her work has been translated into seven languages, and her stories appear regularly in the The New Yorker. She lives in Paris.
FIONA McFARLANE’S HIGHWAY THIRTEEN WAS THE 21st AND MOST RECENT WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE, ANNOUNCED IN MARCH 2025
About The Story Prize
Past winners have been Edwidge Danticat, Patrick O'Keeffe, Mary Gordon, Jim Shepard, Tobias Wolff, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Anthony Doerr, Steven Millhauser, Claire Vaye Watkins, George Saunders, Elizabeth McCracken, Adam Johnson, Rick Bass, Elizabeth Strout, Lauren Groff, Edwidge Danticat (again), Deesha Philyaw, Brandon Taylor, Ling Ma, Paul Yoon, and, most recently, Fiona McFarlane.
The 2026 deadlines for submitting books are July 1 for books published from January through June and November 15 for books published from July through December. You can find a list of short story collections submitted for The Story Prize in 2025 at Bookshop.org.
