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2025 Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction winner: Gladwell Pamba

Congratulations to Gladwell Pamba, who has won this year's $1,250 Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction! Her story, "Little Paradiso," was chosen by final judge Sara Power and is set to be published in our fall issue #232.

The Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction celebrates the achievement of emerging writers who have yet to publish their fiction in book form.

Here's what judge Sara Power had to say about Gladwell's winning story: “The beauty of 'Little Paradiso' lies in the tenacious and crystalline narrative voice of the child narrator, Cheche, who has recently been selected to be child bride. Cheche’s descriptions of people and place portray both innocence and a dawning sense of hypocrisy and injustice. The specificity of her experiences elevates them from symbolism, giving them instead an irreducible, lived-in quality. Cheche’s narration is replete with sensory immediacy and an instinct to convert overwhelming feelings into concrete images: she feels the cactus in her stomach. It is this imagery that shapes raw perception into a story of resistance that is emotionally direct and deeply human.”

 

Gladwell Pamba is a Montreal-based writer from Kenya who has previously won writing fellowships including the International Literary Seminars (ILS), Oxbelly Writers’ Retreat Greece, & the CC Adetula Fellowship for African Women in Creative Writing. She is the winner of Ibua Manuscript Prize 2025 and has previously been nominated for the Best of the Net and longlisted for the Writivism Short Story Prize. Her works are anthologized while others appear in The Rumpus, The Northwest Review, Waxwing Journal, The Offing, and elsewhere. She is an MA graduate from Concordia University’s Creative Writing Program. She hopes to adopt a plant soon.

Look for an interview with Gladwell in our upcoming October or November e-newsletter!

Sara Power is a graduate of the Royal Military College of Canada and has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from The University of British Columbia. Her writing has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies including Best Canadian Stories 2024, which was edited by Lisa Moore. Sara’s fiction has won awards from The Malahat Review and Riddle Fence, and has been a finalist at The Toronto Star, The New Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Fiddlehead, and the 2022 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. Sara’s first book, Art of Camouflage, is a collection of stories featuring a cast of girls and women caught in the military’s orbit. Originally from Labrador, Sara now lives in Ottawa with her partner, three teens and a hound dog.

We would also like to congratulate this year's shortlisters:

Ray Bazowski, "The Geometry of Love"
Andrea Bishop, "Zodiac Attack"
Cody Caetano, "The Farmers"
Mirabelle Harris-Eze, "Water the Plants!"
Imogene Mahalia, "Silk, Satin"
Jaksyn Peacock, "Alphabet Soup"
Elisabeth Shenher, "Dolly, Dolly"
Kailash Srinivasan, "Disprin"