The George Garrett Fiction Prize: Judge’s Choice, selected by Kaveh Akbar
A magic skin cream, a fortune-telling parrot, a chance meeting with a guru godwoman, a dinner in shadows, a giant talking moon bird, milk-drinking Ganesh, even objects in a house after a divorce—when strange, perhaps supernatural, occurrences interrupt people's lives, what price will each pay for choosing to believe in them?
BROWSE
BOOKS
"THERE ARE A LAKE and a mountain at the roof of the world where the air is thin and the clouds linger on cliffsides. These are places of wonder and the journey to see them will take many days. My cousin, Pallu, and I do not know if we will make it to these places or what drives us to go, but this is a journey we promised ourselves..."
Walking in Clouds: A Journey to Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar
ABOUT
Kavi Yaga is the author of The Vanishings: Eight Stories, (Texas Review Press, June 2026) which was selected for the George Garrett Fiction Prize by Kaveh Akbar for the Judge's Choice award. Her travel memoir, Walking in Clouds: A Journey to Mount Kailash and Lake Manasarovar (HarperCollins India, 2018), was nominated for the inaugural AutHer Awards. A 2023 Yaddo Fellow and runner-up for the 2021 Calvino Prize for Speculative Fiction, Kavi attended the 2022 Summer Session at Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her stories and essays have appeared in One Story, The Hindu, and elsewhere. She is co-editor of Work, Wisdom, Legacy: 31 Essays from India (OrientBlackswan, 2025). Kavi lives in Hyderabad with her husband, Hari, and their excitable Golden Retriever, Neo. In previous avataars, she worked as a software engineer in Chicago and a development economics researcher in South India—experiences that inform her interest in how people navigate between different worlds.
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