Fiona McFarlane's "Highway Thirteen," Wins The Story Prize

Fiona McFarlane holding Story Prize award and book cover of "Highway Thirteen"
March 26, 2025

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.”

Read the Q&A with Anne Brice at UC Berkeley News

For me, fiction isn’t about delivering lessons; it’s about creating occasions for a reader to think and feel. I’m more interested in the complexity and ambiguity of the human experience than in any neat summation of it.
Fiona McFarlane, UC Berkeley News Interview with Anne Brice