Winners of the 2020 Kurt Vonnegut Prize in Speculative Literature

Nearly two hundred stories were submitted to the second annual Vonnegut Prize in speculative fiction.  Finalists were sent on to the 2019 contest judge, Andy Duncan.

 

First Place:

The Problematic Douchebag Collective by Kate Osana Simonian

 

Runner Up:

Father Henry by Dan Stintz

 

Honorable Mention:

The Angel of Zucchini by Aaron Tillman

A Trick of the dark by Paola Ferrante

 

Finalists:

I Am Cunigunde by River Adams

The Bananas™ Barcode by Barton Aikman

Diggin' Day by Teege Braune

Sentient Being Blues by Christiopher M. Rose

Black Boy by Bob Ruth

Bodies, Machines, or Elsewhere by Gage Saylor


About Andy Duncan:

Andy Duncan's third collection is An Agent of Utopia: New and Selected Stories (Small Beer Press, 2018). He has a Nebula Award, a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and three World Fantasy Awards and has served on the Bram Stoker, Philip K. Dick and Shirley Jackson awards juries. a professor of writing at Frostburg State University in Maryland, he will lead the first week of the Clarion West writers' workshop in Seattle in summer 2020.

 

About Kurt Vonnegut:

Kurt Vonnegut's long friendship with former North American Review editor Loree Rackstraw brought him often to our hometown of Cedar Falls, Iowa. We are proud to honor the legacy of that friendship with a fiction prize that recognizes speculative writing with the wit, irreverence, humanity, and stylistic daring of its namesake.