Deesha Philyaw
Deesha Philyaw is the author of the debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, which won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow. Her debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, is forthcoming from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2026.
Avi Ben-Zeev
Avi Ben-Zeev is a gay trans man, high school failure, and Yale Ph.D. As a writer, psychologist, and immigrant, he explores the challenges and freedoms of journeying towards belonging and home. Avi’s flash piece, ‘Homeward Bound’, won the 2024 London Independent Story Prize (LISP) and his short story, ‘Angel’, won the 2023 Short Story Prize in the UK’s first transgender writing competition. Avi’s ‘The You Not You’ was shortlisted and highly commended by the 2023 Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, his co-edited anthology, Trans Homo, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and his literary memoir, Calling My Deadname Home, will be released by Muswell Press in November 2024. Find out more at www.avibenzeev.com.
Ian Ellison
Ian Ellison is the postdoctoral researcher on the “Kafka’s Transformative Communities” project at the University of Oxford, where he is based at Wadham College.
He was longlisted for the 2024 Observer Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism and in 2023 he was shortlisted for the Peirene-Stevns Translation Prize. His first book, Late Europeans and Melancholy Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium appeared in 2022.
Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 