Thomas J. Bontly Fiction Award

The Thomas J. Bontly Fiction Award is given to a graduate student in the Department of English who has produced an exceptional work of fiction. Submit a PDF of up to 20 pages of unpublished fiction. Remove any identifying features from your PDF such as your name or student ID number. A PDF file is preferred and simple file names without punctuation, spaces, capital letters, or special characters will experience the least technical problems. E.g. mymanuscript.pdf instead of my_Manuscript.PDF

Applications are typically accepted in mid-spring each year.

The 2024 fiction judge is Belinda Huijuan Tang. Belinda is a 2021 graduate of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow and recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. She holds a BA from Stanford University and was a 2019 work-study fellow at the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. She lived in China from 2016 to 2018 and, while there, received an MA from Peking University in Beijing. She currently lives in Los Angeles. Her novel, Map for the Missing, was published in August 2023.