We are delighted to announce that Rosa Mäkelä is the 2026 winner of The Stinging Fly/FBA Fiction Prize. Established in 2022, the €2000 prize, sponsored by Felicity Bryan Associates, is awarded annually to an emerging fiction writer published in The Stinging Fly during the previous year. This year we are also delighted to include a week long residency at The Mill, a writing retreat giving writers the opportunity to focus on their work in the beautiful environs of rural France.
Rosa’s winning story, ‘Breathwork’ appeared in Issue 52 Volume Two, published in May 2025. Rosa was announced as the winner of the award at the launch event for our Summer 2026 issue at the International Literature Festival Dublin on Saturday May 16th.
Judging the 2026 prize were novelist and short story writer Yan Ge (Strange Beasts of China), Stinging Fly contributing editor and author Danny Denton (All Along The Echo) and FBA agent, Carrie Plitt. The panel was chaired by our programme manager, Eoin Rogers.
Awarding the prize, the judges stated:
“Breathwork is an example of how the best short stories are their own contained world. Full of characters that feel real, dialogue that rings true, and places that seem lived in, it is convincingly told from the perspective of a young girl whose world is shaken when her estranged father comes to pick her up from dance class. The suspense is real but never unearned, and we were constantly surprised by where it took us. It’s a beautifully controlled story that effortlessly balances thought and action, past and present. Elegant and remarkably nuanced, Breathwork is a brilliant case study of short fiction’s ability to probe a wide range of human conditions while remaining exquisitely self-contained.”
Accepting the award Rosa commented:
“Winning the FBA Fiction prize means so much to me, I feel a new boost of confidence in my own work and it has reinvigorated my enthusiasm and determination to keep writing. Having Breathwork published in the Stinging Fly last year was a huge achievement for me in itself and to have another reminder that the story has connected with people is so encouraging, and feels like such a gift.”
You can read Rosa’s winning story ‘Breathwork’ here.
Rosa joined Nicole Flattery on The Stinging Fly podcast in September to discuss the process of writing Breathwork. You can listen back to that episode here.
The judges highly commended two other stories: ‘The Road Trip’ by Jazelle Jajeh and ‘Temporary’ by Odrán Waldron both from Issue 52 Volume Two:
‘The Road Trip’ by Jazelle Jajeh
“The Road Trip is both emphatic and restrained. It weaves a vivid and stirring tapestry, inviting us to contemplate a series of notions and their superimposed, ghostly doubles: home and alienation from it, freedom and its absence, belonging and its deprivation, and the sea that lies within grasp but can never be reached.”
‘Temporary’ by Odrán Waldron
“Temporary is a typhoon of a story, picking you up, dragging you through a situation, a moment of life, and dropping you as suddenly as it took you, leaving you in total disarray, dragging at your eyeballs, struggling to right yourself. Its rhythm is irresistible – its pulse – the sentences – is its mantra. It breathes the immediacy and physicality of the best fiction, and its writer’s confidence shows in choices that leave off contextual explanation and character motive. Instead, Temporary‘s illumination lies in its being, it’s happening on the page. Protagonists that feel (to themselves even) like avatars, like engines, and rhythms that serve a daily fugue of work, and the devastating connotations of a single lie – the themes and emotions engaged by this work feel so important to write about, and so urgent in the writing. This is a writer with a very keen eye for what matters in life, and a superb hand for getting the feeling of it exactly right on the page.”
Previous winners of The Stinging Fly/FBA Fiction Prize:
2025: Tenaya Steed: ‘Missing the Eclipse’
2024: Moso Sematlane: ‘A Fern Between Rocks’
2023: Leopold O’Shea, ‘The Afterlife’
2022: Emer O’Hanlon, ‘Diana in a Lonely Place’