The final results of the 2025 Big Moose Prize are in! And the winning manuscript is Far Ocean by Emily Mitchell.
Excerpt
I thought that my father was going to murder me. You want to know how I became that impossible thing, a woman mariner? That is the truth. That is the briefest answer I can give for how my strange history came about. I thought that if I did not run away and disappear, I would come home one day from some errand or chore and find him waiting for me. He would be in that dark temper which came over him whenever he’d drunk too much wine, when it did not matter what you said or did but he would find offense in it. If I was fortunate, he might then merely break some vital part of me – an arm or maybe my nose for a second time. He might leave me with only a few bruises, a black eye, perhaps a lump like a red egg upon my head. But I did not believe my luck would be so good as that. Not after what had happened the last time that we met. Not with what I’d done to him.
And so, for this reason, I left. Not just my family’s house, such as it was. I left the whole vicinity where I’d been raised, the only portion of the world I’d ever known. I was about nineteen years old (I could not be sure of my age, my precise birthday being something no one ever bothered to recall). Till then I’d never gone more than a few leagues from where I was born. I did not realize how far fortune would see fit to carry me. Or that it would be years before I saw my native place again, if, in fact, I ever do. Or that I would be changed from what I was then into…but I have got ahead of myself now. You cannot really understand how my departure came about, or how I got into such enmity with my own sire, or how, after long months, I found a place for myself on a ship bound for the South Seas, without learning something of what went before. I must go farther back into the past. Back to when I was a child. Back to when my mother was alive. To when she started teaching me the things that would turn out to matter so much later on, the first of which, the most important, was how to look about myself and truly see.
———-
Emily Mitchell grew up in London, England and moved to the United States as a teenager. She is the author of The Last Summer of the World (W. W. Norton, 2007), a novel, which was a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Award, and two collections of short fiction: Viral (W. W. Norton, 2015) and The Church of Divine Electricity, winner of the 2023 Elixir Press Fiction Prize, forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in November 2025. Her stories have appeared in Harpers’, The Sun, The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, American Short Fiction and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the New Statesman (UK), Guernica and Washington Independent Review of Books. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Can Serrat International Artists Residency. She serves as fiction editor for New England Review and teaches at the University of Maryland. She lives just outside Washington DC with her husband, the writer and editor J. M. Tyree.
———-
Far Ocean will be published in March of 2027. To see the full list of the 2024 Big Moose Prize finalists, click here.