Posts Tagged: Fiction Prize

Убедитесь, что у вас есть рабочее зеркало Вавада для непрерывного игрового опыта.
Article Thumbnail

Announcing the 2020 Fiction Prize Winner

We are excited to announce the winner and finalists of the 2020 Fiction Prize, judged by Angela Flournoy. Many thanks to everyone who submitted their work and made this year’s prize possible!

2020 Fiction Prize Winner

“Air Hunger” by María José Candela

Angela Flournoy says, “What makes “Air Hunger” impressive is the writer’s ability to evoke two modes of being at once. There are the two settings–the winter streets of Rome, with its young clergy and indifferent taxi drivers; and the shopping malls, apartments and swimming pools of Medellín. The story also examines two postures, both façades, that the narrator adopts at different points in her life. The result of this duality is a main character who feels complicated and real, one who is capable of accessing her regret as well as agency. This narrator and the story she tells will undoubtedly linger in readers’ minds.”

Finalists

“We All Live Here Forever” by Marguerite Alley

“My Wish for You in the Land of the Dead: a Cuban Sandwich” by Leslie Blanco

“We” by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

“Wolf Tale” by Anne Guidry

“Compound Fractures” by Alice Hatcher

“Hotel Indigo” by Elie Piha

The winner will be published in the Winter 2020 issue of Indiana Review.

Interview with 2020 Fiction Prize Judge Angela Flournoy

The 2020 Fiction Prize is open until March 31! In this interview, our fiction editor Jenna Wengler sits down with prize judge Angela Flournoy to talk about her writing influences, ghosts, and what makes a great short story.


Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times notable book of the year. The novel was also a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and an NAACP Image Award. She is a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree for 2015. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Flournoy received her undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California. She has taught at the University of Iowa, The New School, Columbia University, Princeton University and the University of California at Los Angeles.

Flournoy was the 2016-17 Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She was awarded a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and is currently a Mary Ellen von der Heyden fellow in fiction at the American Academy in Berlin. 


The Turner House is in some ways deeply rooted in realism, as it explores the traumatic effects of the 2008 Subprime Mortgage Crisis on an African American family in Detroit. And yet, the novel opens with a chaotic encounter with a “haint,” and Cha-Cha’s struggle with the haint becomes one of the most memorable storylines in the novel. How did you negotiate the relationship between the characters’ brutal financial reality and the ghost story? Do you think about genre as you write, or does blending genre come naturally?

I think that for many writers genre is a concept you learn or are taught to take into account long after you develop your love of stories and storytelling. I don’t think about genre when writing, I think about the best way to tell the story I’d like to tell, as well as what elements feel real to the world I’m creating for my characters. In The Turner House, many, but not all characters believe in the possibility of a haint being real. My portrayal of the haint is rooted in exploring these characters’ relationships to their own beliefs. I never gave much thought to the conventions of incorporating this “magical” element into the story; I simply considered how it might impact my characters.

This introduction of the haint in the opening chapter of the novel feels like a reference to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. However, in a departure from Beloved, your ghost scene is injected with a sense of humor that continues to crop up throughout the story. How does humor function in a novel that also deals quite seriously with such topics as race, intergenerational trauma, and financial ruin?

The epigraph of The Turner House includes a quotes from Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men: “The negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries.” This, in part, encapsulates my tonal approach to the novel. 

If a short story were a house, what would be its foundation? In other words, what elements do you see as most essential to crafting a great short story?

When I think about what differentiates an acceptable short story from a truly great one, it is skin in the game. Where is that kernel of true feeling or insight that elevates all other parts of the narrative?

What are your literary obsessions? What images or ideas do you find yourself returning to again and again?

There are way too many images to name, but I will say that compellingly-rendered human interactions trump abstract ideas for me in most cases.

And finally, what are you reading right now?

I am reaching Romance in Marseille, a newly-released novel by Claude McKay which was written in the 1930s but never published.

Article Thumbnail

Announcing the 2016 Fiction Prize winner!

We are excited to announce that judge Aimee Bender has selected “Nothing Before Something” by Kimberly King Parsons as the winner of Indiana Review’s 2016 Fiction Prize! Thank you to everyone who submitted their work and made this year’s prize possible. “Nothing Before Something” will appear in our Winter 2017 issue.

2016 Fiction Prize Winner:

“Nothing Before Something” by Kimberly King Parsons

Aimee Bender says about the winning piece: “This was a tough decision; there were a lot of very fine stories in the mix here. I picked “Nothing Before Something” as the winner because it kept pulling me to it, pulling me in. Even if I tried to read fast, the natural movement of the narration forced me to slow down, and, paradoxically, there was urgency behind the sentences that created part of this slowing, a drive in Sheila that connects to emotional power. A lot of this is that elusive thing–voice. The author clearly knows how to make sentences that are unique, but that distinctiveness is all in the service of giving us a person, this Sheila, in a moment of her life, driven toward Tim as she negotiates the world of suffering—her own, and that of others, too. Basically, I just read along happily and I would’ve happily read more. There’s even a slightly sprawly messy feeling here too which seems hopeful to me, like this writer can keep trying stuff out and trusting the power of voice and valuing where it naturally leads. Readers are in for a real treat.”

Finalists

“Cowbirds” by Kristen Arnett

“Liam and the Head” by Courtney Bird

“In the Skin” by Katie Flynn

“The Ninki-nanka” by Ah-reum Han

“House of Locks and Doors” by Micah Dean Hicks

“Everything Shined” by Maggie O’Brien

“The Keener” by Eric Schlich

“The Floating Fat Woman” by Chelsea Sutton

“Heaven for Your Full Lungs” by David E. Yee