Nigerian writer Chika Onyenezi has won the 2025 George Garrett Fiction Prize for his work, Blood, as selected by final judge Fernando Flores.
This is the kind of collection one hopes to find—filled with an urgency of voice bordering on desperation, and vivid characters, vivid originality—this collection of interconnected stories shook me with its poetry and its violence. Blood reminds us why fiction—why literature—exists in the first place, reminds us that stories are not just stories, they are things that are alive, that dance around us and exist. Just a shattering collection, one I look forward to rereading. I can’t wait to have it in my hands as a book!
Using stark, poetic strokes, Blood sets the stage on an unforgiving, modern world where folklore and violence, rivers and streets, are as alive as any of our memories. This collection marks the arrival of an important, resounding voice and imagination. I am proud to choose it as the winner.
— Fernando A. Flores, author of Brother Brontë and Tears of the Trufflepig
Chika Onyenezi, born in Owerri and now based in Houston, Texas, has built a body of work across TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Chicago Quarterly Review, and other journals. He is a 2018 Kimbilio Fellow and a recipient of the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, with his story “Twenty Thousand Cedis” winning the Scoundrel Time Editors’ Choice Award in Fiction.
Among the finalists is Nigerian writer Ibrahim Babátúndé Ibrahim, recognized for his collection of short stories, Chaos and Cousins.
A UK-based writer and editor, Ibrahim Babátúndé Ibrahim serves as managing editor at the Journal of African Youth Literature. He won the American Literary Review Award in 2025, the Creative Future Writers’ Award in 2024, and the Quramo Writers’ Prize in 2022. He has been a finalist for the Faber Children’s FAB Prize and the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship, with longlistings for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the CRAFT Short Story Prize, and the Dzanc Diverse Voices Prize, among other honours.
Established in 1998, the George Garrett Fiction Prize is administered by the University Press of SHSU and comes with a $2,000 advance, a standard royalty contract, and 10 copies of the published book.
George Garrett (1929-2008), for whom this competition is named, is the author of thirty-two books and editor or co-editor of nineteen others. He earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees from Princeton University and taught for forty years at the University of Virginia. Among his honors and awards are the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Sewanee Review Fellowship in Poetry, fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He won the T.S. Eliot Award of the Ingersoll Foundation, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Congratulations, Chika Onyenezi and Ibrahim Babátúndé Ibrahim!
