Mimi Kawahara wins Desperate Literature’s short fiction prize

Mimi Kawahara has won the 2026 Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize with Disaster preparedness test, ex post facto. The independent Madrid bookshop named Eric Baker’s This History of Violence and Emily Roese’s Slug as runners-up. The final selection also contained nine other stories, including Imogen Clarke’s The Bear, L. J. de Pedro’s Natural Language and Esther Leaming’s The Thousand Lives of Judas Iscariot. The prize builds a pathway around short fiction that combines anonymous judging, publication and relationships with partner magazines and residencies. The result moves an individual text beyond the private space of a manuscript: the bookshop becomes a place of editorial discovery and a meeting point between narrative experiment, readers and international literary networks.