We are pleased to announce the winner of the second annual Commonweal Prize for Short Fiction. This year’s prize is awarded to Elina Kumra for her short story, “Black Hole above Gaza.”

A BIPOC writer based in California, Kumra is a Bridport Prize finalist in both poetry and fiction. She is a recipient of the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry and the Dan Veach Prize in Fiction, both of which are awarded by The Madison Review, an independent literary journal within the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s creative-writing department.

As part of this year’s selection process, associate editor Regina Munch and special projects editor Miles Doyle considered nearly one-hundred submissions from an impressive pool of talented young writers. “Kumra’s story is lyrical and urgent,” Doyle said. “Reading it, I was completely immersed in the narrative. She is an impressive and courageous young writer, exactly the kind of storyteller we want to honor with our fiction prize.”

Vinson Cunningham, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Great Expectations, served as this year’s guest judge.

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 prize in fiction seeks to honor this history while grounding Commonweal’s commitment to fiction firmly in the present day.

Launched last year 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 Books issue, which is published every July.

You can read “Black Hole above Gaza” here.