Akhim Alexis has won McSweeney’s 2025 Stephen Dixon Award for Short Fiction, the publisher announced in a news release.
Alexis won the prize for his short story “My Son’s Name is Not Cassava,” which the press will publish in November in McSweeney’s Quarterly 80. The issue will also feature stories from the two runners-up: “Composure” by Colin Heasley and “Ashes” by Olga Lexell.
Alexis, according to his biography in Electric Literature, is from Trinidad and Tobago; he previously won the Brooklyn Caribbean Lit Fest Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean.
Judging this year’s Stephen Dixon Award were Steven Dunn, Joseph Grantham, and Vi Khi Nao.
This is the second year for the Stephen Dixon Award, first given to Kristina Ten for her story “Adjective.” The prize is named after the prolific novelist and story writer known for his books Frog, Interstate, and Gould; he died in 2019 at the age of 83.
Antonia Frydman and Sophia Frydman, Dixon’s daughters, said in a statement, “The Stephen Dixon Award for Short Fiction was created to honor our father’s work by giving recognition to emerging writers of formally experimental short fiction, whose work feels aligned with his in being both rigorously boundary pushing and deeply humane. Although our father published many novels, his practice was centered around short stories, and each one was a chance for him to reinvent the form.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
