Erika Krouse has won the 2026 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, sponsored by the New Literary Project and honoring "emerged and continually emerging writers of major consequence--short stories and/or novels--at the relative midpoint of a burgeoning career." Her most recent publication is a book of short stories, Save Me, Stranger (Flatiron Books).
The award has a $50,000 prize, and Krouse will spend a brief residence during the 2026 NewLit Roadshow at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the Bay Area, including Saint Mary's College of California--teaching and public speaking in a variety of educational and literary settings--in October.
Oates said, "Save Me, Stranger is a collection of riveting first-person accounts, each so uniquely credible and engaging, the reader is inclined to think that it must be Erika Krouse herself speaking in an intimate, confining, candid way, telling us secrets she has shared with no one else. Yet--and this is the surprise and the delight of Erika's fiction--each of the voices is a distinct character, usually but not always a young woman; locales are wildly different--from a Siberian village that is 'the coldest place on earth' to the lurid Red Light district of Bangkok; from a remote bed-and-breakfast in the Rocky Mountains to the outskirts of Tokyo--while each is perceived, by the astute eye of the beholder, as 'the center of all rings, loneliness.' Here is masterly storytelling, so deftly accomplished, with such warmth and sympathy, the reader is totally immersed in each story, wishing only sometimes that it might be longer, and our engagement with these so-human, so-fascinating characters prolonged."
Caroline Bleeke, editorial director, fiction, Flatiron Books, said in part, "Over the past five years, I have had the privilege of working with Erika on both her fiction and nonfiction, and am continually astonished by her range, imagination, and immense talent. As you can feel in every page of her writing, Erika has a seemingly endless curiosity about our world and a boundless capacity for empathy. Her characters are nuanced and knotty, never romanticized and never judged. There is such an emotional expansiveness to her writing, regardless of length or format, and I am grateful to work with an author who shines a light into the darker corners of our world, unafraid of what might be revealed."