We are so very honoured to announce the winners of the Jacob Zilber Short Fiction Prize 2019. Please meet our wonderful winners as selected by judge Casey Plett.
Winner: “The Last Snow Globe Repairman in the World” by Hsien Chong Tan, Vancouver, BC
Hsien Chong Tan was born in Singapore and lives in Vancouver with his wife and cats. He holds an MFA from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin. His work has appeared in Mid-American Review, Crab Orchard Review and elsewhere. This is his first Canadian publication.
First runner-up: “Victory Day” by Cassidy McFadzean, Toronto, ON
Cassidy McFadzean was born in Regina, graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and currently lives in Toronto. She is the author of Hacker Packer (McClelland & Stewart 2015), which won two Saskatchewan Book Awards and was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and Drolleries (M&S 2019). Her poems have appeared in BOAAT, Event, The Fiddlehead, PRISM international, and The Best Canadian Poetry 2016, and have been shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and The Walrus Poetry Prize. “Victory Day” is her first short story publication.
Second runner-up: “Toy Wonderland” by Jenessa Abrams, New York, NY, USA
Jenessa Abrams is a Norman Mailer Fiction Fellow and has been awarded fellowships and grants from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center and Columbia University, where she earned her MFA in fiction and literary translation. Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Guernica, Tin House, The Rumpus, BOMB Magazine and elsewhere. Currently, she lives in New York City, where she is pursuing a subsequent graduate degree in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University.