Commonweal is pleased to the winner of the third annual Commonweal Prize for Short Fiction. This year’s prize is awarded to Linda Kinstler for her short story, “Waidmannslust.”

A Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, Kinstler is the author of Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends, which was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize for Jewish literature and awarded a Whiting Award for Nonfiction. “Waidmannslust” is her first published work of fiction.

Phil Klay, the National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment and Missionaries, served as this year’s guest judge. “There’s a certain sadness, a certain irony, but also a painful honesty as characters who have devoted their lives to international policy confront the irrelevance of their public rhetoric and their reasonable positions in confronting our globe’s bewildering future,” he writes about Kinstler’s prizewinning submission. “Yes, it’s a quiet story—a few friends discussing ideas and foreign policy. But that’s what makes the story so unsettling. Underneath it is the abyss laid out before us all, which Kinstler’s characters are only just starting to peer into.”

For more than 100 years, Commonweal has published some of the best writers of fiction, from Graham Greene and Alice McDermott to Andre Dubus and Mary Gordon. The fiction prize seeks to honor that history while grounding Commonweal’s commitment to fiction firmly in the present day.

Launched in 2024 as part of our centennial celebration, the Commonweal Prize for Short Fiction recognizes original and outstanding short fiction from emerging writers. The winning story appears in the magazine’s annual summer issue, which is published every July.

You can read “Waidmannslust” here.