Announcing the Winners of the 2026 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction

Tommy Orange was awarded a much-deserved MacArthur Genius Grant this fall for breaking from the tradition of reservation-based Native American literature to write new, illuminative, and realistic Native fiction set in modern urban life. This year Orange also brought his bright light to the project of editing the O. Henry Prize collection, and the book he created is truly genius. The stories he selected are new; they take risks and ask questions about the communities in which we live; they expand our understanding of life and death, of family and friendships; and they succeed at what O. Henry’s friends first set out to do with the prize when they established it in his honor in 1919. Thinking ahead to the next generation, they wanted it to “stimulate younger authors.”

Tommy Orange has produced two wildly successful novels, but he is humble by nature. Is genius humble? Not in movies like Oppenheimer and The Aviator, where it booms and flashes like a firework, but in real life, wouldn’t genius prefer, even need, quiet in order to flow? Short stories are humble too; they request so little of our time.

Accepting the MacArthur Award, Tommy Orange said, “Specificity makes something feel universal . . . other people connect to it.” His short story “Freyr,” published in Zoetrope, has an example of what he meant.

They referred to Frank as the guy with the hand that came out of his chest. It doesn’t even make sense. Hand that came out of his chest. It didn’t come out. It was just there. The problem is with language, what it reveals about our biological biases. Our clum-siness regarding all things abnormal. Normal is vanilla, nonspe-cific, flavorless, colorless . . . His hand no more came out of his chest than our hands come out of our wrists, and our heads out of our necks. The hand was there like his other two hands were there, only in a different place. He had an extra hand, if extra can or should be used here I’m not sure, maybe it’s better just to say Frank had a third hand, and it was on his chest.

“Frank had a third hand, and it was on his chest” has a touch of genius.

Anahid Nersessian, in a recent review of several books for The Yale Review, wrote, “A few of [the books] had great sentences, but great sentences are compatible with moral vacuity if their author is compelled by little beyond her private experience of the world.” Of course Nersessian is right. Sentences can be insightful and true, but they can’t be genius without attempting to connect to a larger purpose, an act which requires humility. Tommy Orange’s body of work is rooted in humility.

O. Henry was interested in exploring humble characters in his stories. In “The Fool-Killer,” he introduces a legendary ghost who travels when summoned to murder young offspring not heeding the advice of their parents. As the Fool-Killer orchestrates a trick that allows a foolish father to finally listen to his truly wise son, so does O. Henry, like all good storytellers, orchestrate the greater trick of connecting readers to the human family they occupy, its truths and possibilities.

This year’s O. Henry Prize winners illustrate genius in a variety of ways that both expand upon and honor the traditions of the short-story form. Four are beautifully translated from their original languages. Two are epistolary stories—as ideal a format for a father in a correctional facility as it is for a young Nigerian woman whose boy-friend has disappeared with her money. One story unfolds across several social media platforms and in another an automated algo-rithm launches a love affair. Four stories make music visceral—two accomplished pianists, a boy constantly plugged into his earphones, and a quintet with five young Native American voices. There is a genre-bending western; two stories blend speculative details with realism to portray women planning their escapes; three stories spec-ify the only-daughter experience; and one story flirts with where to begin. A human-bear memorizes lines of poetry; other tales feature hares, horses, a tiger in a clothing storeroom—there are many ani-mals on these pages, and many people between worlds.

O. Henry published “The Fool-Killer” in The Voice of the City in 1908, two years before he died at home in New York City at age forty-seven. Just a few years earlier, not far outside the city, a young man, Albert Einstein, had made exciting discoveries in quantum physics, and although scientific genius and artistic genius are not quite the same, it is conceivable that O. Henry was influenced in his later writing by the zeitgeist’s appreciation for genius youth over old fools.

“Young physicists at the time were part of a revolution in theoretical knowledge. The development of quantum mechanics meant that older theories and knowledge were less relevant to what they were doing,” Bruce Weinberg, a researcher, told NBC News. “It may be that young scientists did better, in part, because they never learned the older ways of thinking and could think in new ways . . . People like Einstein . . . thought that physics really belonged to young people, and that turns out to be fairly true for their time.”

Quantum physics uncovered how particles behave in a paradox-ical way. When not observed, a particle will act like a wave, even though it has mass. Only when measured does a particle behave like a particle, occupying a specific point in space. Matter should not be able to exist as both a wave and a particle at once. And yet, impossibly, it does. Many of this year’s O. Henry Prize winners manifest a youthful, new way of seeing in their stories. If our world is to be saved it will be by the genius of the next generations.

But different stages of life offer their own distinct waves of light for artists to shift into shapes, and an appreciation for build-ing off work by preceding writers can also be found in this year’s collection. There is a story with Chekhovian characters, another that bursts from the strong tradition of Irish fiction, and one that explores the new immigrant experience within the medical drama genre. Respect for age-earned wisdom manifests in three stories where older selves speak to their younger selves across time.

Sentences contain particles of meaning that resist being pinned down and measured, instead combining and transforming into mysterious waves of story that take us beyond the limits of our own horizons. Let’s forgive the fool-killers. Is it possible for our third hands to reach out from our hearts and touch across time? Tommy Orange brought genius and generosity to the project of joining these twenty amazing stories together. In his novel Wandering Stars, Orange writes, “The spiders weave a web to keep the stars in place, as guiding light in our darknesses. The stars are our ancestors, but the spiders are too. They are the weaving and the light.”

That human-bear who memorized lines of poetry as a circus trick grew out of an old Russian fairy tale. Do people still learn their favorite lines by heart? The words are all ahead for you. My deadline has arrived. Can I lead you into a book as I am leaving it? It’s time to pass the thread to Tommy, who, through the work, has become my friend. I hope you have picked up this book on a beautiful, light-filled day when good things in the world are happening. Through the prism of time to all of you readers and writers, grappling with love and humor, fear and pain, alert to the touch of genius, to the hope of healing that new art can carry, it’s all around you if you look. Don’t give up on it. The glory of the sun is that it rises the next morning, and I hope these stories will help you feel the tiny particles that impossibly transform into that wave of light here on earth.

Jenny Minton Quigley
December 2025

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“Five Bridges”
Colm Tóibín, The New Yorker

“Flowers and Their Meanings”
Marie-Helene Bertino, The Baffler

“American Realism”
Brandon Taylor, The Atlantic

“The Hare”
Ismael Ramos, translated from the Galician by Jacob Rogers, The Common

“Where Are You and Where Is My Money”
Ucheoma Onwutuebe, A Public Space

“Love of My Days”
Louise Erdrich, The New Yorker

“Stick Season”
Jenny Xie, The Sewanee Review

“She-Bear”
Evgenia Nekrasova, translated from the Russian by Marianna Suleymanova, The Kenyon Review

“This Time and the Next”
Noel Quiñones, Michigan Quarterly Review

“Pretend”
Mary Williams, CRAFT

“Case Study”
Weike Wang, The Atlantic

“Inês”
João Pedro Vala, The Common

“Tender”
Sarah LaBrie, Electric Literature

“Earshot”
Guka Han, translated from the French by Katie Shireen Assef, The Dial

“The Masterclass”
William Pei Shih, The Los Angeles Review

“Welcome to the Club”
Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, The Yale Review

“Waiting, a Quintet”
Kimberly Blaeser, The Kenyon Review

“Muscle to Muscle, Toe to Toe”
Kim Samek, Zyzzyva

“All Stories”
Kevin Wilson, Michigan Quarterly Review

“The Ghost Coat”
Catherine Lacey, Granta