Iheoma Nwachukwu has been named this year’s winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His collection Japa & Other Stories will be published by the University of Georgia Press in the fall of 2024.
Established in 1983, the Flannery O’Connor Award seeks to encourage talented writers of short stories by presenting their work to a wider readership. Annual winners of the competition are offered publication of a book-length collection and a one-thousand-dollar prize. The Flannery O’Connor Award has helped launch the literary careers of previous winners such as Ha Jin, Antonya Nelson, Rita Ciresi, and Mary Hood. For additional information about the award, visit the series page on the University of Georgia Press’s website.
Iheoma Nwachukwu is a fiction writer and poet. He has won fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Michener Center, and the Chinua Achebe Center. His work has been published in Ploughshares, the Southern Review, the Iowa Review, AGNI, Electric Literature, Crazyhorse, and other venues. Iheoma is an assistant professor at Eastern University.
Flannery O’Connor series editor Lori Ostlund said of the collection: “Japa & Other Stories by Iheoma Nwachukwu is everything that I hope to come upon as the series editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction: a voice that is at once fresh and fully formed, characters and premises that delight and surprise and edify. ‘Japa’ refers to the characters who people the world of these loosely linked stories: Nigerians in the diaspora, often caught in the liminal space between leaving (in search of education or stability or something less definable) and arrival, not yet sure where they will find themselves or when or even how they will get there. The opening story, ‘Japa Boys,’ introduces a group of young Nigerian men studying in Utah and smuggling beer on the side; ‘Japa Beach Hotel’ follows one of these men, deported and longing to return to Utah, while working at a hotel in Zanzibar; and in ‘You Illegals’ a young man leaves Lagos for Russia, ostensibly to attend the World Cup but really hoping to make it to Finland, where he aspires to receive asylum and ‘make a loving family.’ Addressing themes ranging from emigration and brotherhood to humanity and inhumanity (often side by side) and the situational ethics of survival, the stories that make up Japa & Other Stories are humorous and compassionate, clear eyed, and lyrical. I love and admire every story in Iheoma Nwachukwu’s essential collection.”
This year’s finalists include Green Planting a Long Way Off by Chee Brossy, What Kills You by Matt Cashion, The Floor Is Lava by Paul Crenshaw, and Straw Dogs in Paradise by Natalie Storey. The winning book from last year’s competition, Carol Roh Spaulding’s Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories will be available in the fall of 2023.
Submissions for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction are accepted April 1 through May 31 each year. For guidelines and more information about the award, please visit the series page for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.
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