The Georgia Review congratulates L. F. Khouri, who was selected by Kiese Laymon as the winner of the 2026 Georgia Review Prose Prize, and Soraya Palmer, who was chosen as runner-up.
Khouri will receive $1,500 for his story “Go Anywhere. Do Anything.” Palmer will receive $600 for her essay “The Story and Its Writer: A Glossary of Terms.”
L. F. KHOURI is a Palestinian writer whose work explores war, memory, and the inheritance of silence. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in literary journals such as New England Review, The Missouri Review, River Teeth, Brevity, Michigan Quarterly Review, Wigleaf, Alaska Quarterly Review, North American Review, EPOCH, Guernica, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Massachusetts Review, and Booth, among others. Two of his pieces were selected for Best Microfiction 2026.
SORAYA PALMER is the author of The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts (Catapult, 2023), which won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for debut fiction and has been shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. She has been awarded grants, residencies, and fellowships for her writing from the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Blue Mountain Residency, and the Nawat Fes Residency in Fes, Morocco. Her prose can be found in Guernica, Callaloo, Ploughshares, and Hazlitt, among other publications. She was born and raised in Flatbush and is a social worker and therapist who has organized and advocated for criminalized survivors of gender-based violence, tenants facing eviction, and victims of police brutality. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Nicholas.
We would like to thank everyone who submitted to this year’s contest. More information about the contest is available here. We look forward to reading work from both previous and first-time entrants when the next Georgia Review Prose Prize opens on November 1, 2026.