Ucheoma Onwutuebe is a 2026 O. Henry Prize winner! The Nigerian writer’s story “Where Are You and Where Is My Money,” first published in A Public Space No. 32, has been selected for this year’s edition of the prize anthology, one of twenty stories chosen by guest editor Tommy Orange from thousands in consideration.

Named after William Sydney Porter, the American short story writer who published under the pen name O. Henry and whose twist-ending tales made the short story a popular form at the turn of the twentieth century, the prize was established in 1919 by his friends and admirers with the explicit aim of honouring the best American short fiction and, in their words, stimulating younger authors. Over a century later, it remains one of the most coveted prizes in short fiction, published annually as an anthology that has over the decades featured the early and landmark work of writers including Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, and Alice Munro. Each year a guest editor, themselves a distinguished fiction writer, selects the winning stories. This year’s guest editor is Tommy Orange, whose own debut novel There There announced him as one of the defining American fiction writers of his generation.

Onwutuebe’s story is epistolary in form, told through letters, emails, and other written correspondence, and follows a young Nigerian woman whose boyfriend has disappeared with her money. It is exactly the kind of story the O. Henry Prize has always championed: rooted in the textures of ordinary life and devastating. In a conversation published by Africa in Words, Onwutuebe traced the story’s origins to a fiction workshop, a reading of Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, and the emergence of the Tinder Swindler story in public consciousness. “Much of it was borrowed from the reality of how my people, everyday Nigerians, speak,” she said of her approach to the story’s multiple voices, “and I’m glad it worked here.”

Onwutuebe is the recipient of the Waasnode Fiction Prize and has held residencies at Yaddo, Art Omi, and The Anderson Center. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Bellevue Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Off Assignment, Split Lip, and Bakwa Magazine, among others, and, it is worth noting, in Brittle Paper, where she published Village Memories and Heart Collector. She holds an MFA from the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

The 2026 O. Henry Prize collection was edited by Tommy Orange, whose selection Onwutuebe joins alongside writers including Colm Tóibín, Louise Erdrich, and Brandon Taylor. The anthology, published by Vintage, is out now.