The 21st Winner of The Story Prize Is Highway Thirteen by Fiona McFarlane!

Photo: Beowulf Sheehan

The winner of The Story Prize for books published in 2024 is Fiona McFarlane for Highway Thirteen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The other finalists were Ruben Reyes Jr. for There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven (Mariner Books) and Jessi Jezewska Stevens for Ghost Pains (And Other Stories). The Story Prize’s $20,000 top prize is among the largest first-prize amounts of any annual U.S. book award for fiction. As runners-up, Reyes and Stevens each received $5,000. 

Highway Thirteen is McFarlane's fourth book of fiction and her second short story collection. The judges cited the book for the conceptual and thematic ingenuity of the collection as a whole and the precise and astute execution of the individual stories.

Director Larry Dark and Founder Julie Lindsey selected the three finalists for The Story Prize, now in its 20th year, from among 107 short story collections published in 2024, representing 87 different publishers or imprints. Three judges—writer and editor Elliott Holt; writer Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and bookseller Lucy Yu—determined the winner from among the three books chosen as finalists.