UC Berkeley English is delighted to announce that Professor Fiona McFarlane’s 2024 collection of short stories, Highway Thirteen, has won The Story Prize. We offer our warm congratulations to Professor McFarlane. The judges of the prize cited the “conceptual and thematic ingenuity of the collection as a whole and the precise execution of every story.” The Story Prize annually honors the author of an outstanding short-story collection and is among the largest cash-prize awards for a collection of short fiction. McFarlane’s work was selected from a pool of 107 collections published in 2024, representing 82 different publishers and imprints. For more information, see The Story Prize's announcement.
Highway Thirteen narrates, in 12 stories, the impacts of the violence of one man: a fictional serial killer whose murders have made the small town of Burrows, Australia, infamous. But the narrative framework leaves out his story, focusing instead on the long reverberations of that violence. As McFarlane recently told UC Berkeley News’ Anne Brice, “In these stories, Biga is never the protagonist. He never has a chance to tell his own story, we never have access to what he’s thinking and feeling, and we never see him kill. I thought of him as a stone thrown into the middle of a pond — the focus isn’t on the stone itself, but on the ripples it creates.”