NORA SMITH
Staff Writer
Writer Hassaan Mirza breaks away from a conventional narrative in his 2026 Janus Prize-winning short story “Name, Place, Animal, Thing” and hopes to offer readers a new perspective on conflicts.
“I was interested in thinking how a short story could be a vehicle for ideas and for experimentation in form,” Mirza said. “So, the fact that the reading experience is enriched not only by the completion of narrative but also the experience of a deception of form. So as you’re reading, the story keeps changing itself; it becomes a different experience.”
Growing up in Pakistan, Mirza said he played a children’s game called Name, Place, Animal, Thing, which eventually became both the name and the narrative structure of the story and presented him with a lot of freedom.
“I feel excited that there’s a prize out there that recognizes formal innovation or experimentation in short stories, especially,” Mirza said.
During a celebratory event at 4 p.m. today in the parlor of the Athenaeum Hotel, Mirza will give a public lecture and reading; he will also receive $5,000, plus travel and lodging, to partake in a weeklong writing residency at Chautauqua Institution.
Michael I. Rudell Director of Literary Arts Stephine Hunt said the Janus Prize is in its ninth year and is awarded to short prose, fiction or nonfiction that challenges conventions and does something never seen before while being written by an emerging writer who has not published a book-length work yet.
“What I really love to celebrate about the innovative piece of this prize is it invites not just breaking of conventions and form, etc., but genre bending in ways that you wouldn’t expect …” Hunt said.
Hunt said there are very few awards like the Janus Prize, and it is important because it supports emerging writers like Mirza.
“He’s incredible, and his work is really emotionally impactful and fun, which is a very difficult thing to balance,” Hunt said.
Mirza said the story was inspired by the cultural shift in the U.S. and world after the COVID-19 pandemic, including changes in society’s structure, the consumption of media and the difference in how people speak about politics and identity.
“I was interested in thinking about how that can be told through the story of an interracial family and the generational difference between parents and children and wife and husband,” Mirza said.
Mirza said he was also drawn to writing about the “unique and strange experience” of the pandemic.
“That to me, that felt very interesting narratively, like if someone’s entire life is going in one direction and suddenly, just when they’re about to enter middle age, the whole world sort of shifts and their expectations shift, how would that cause a disruption in their lives?” Mirza said.
He added that he was interested in a person’s decision to either continue living as before the pandemic or alter their life accordingly.
Another source of Mirza’s inspiration was his visits to the Cincinnati Zoo after the pandemic. Here, Mirza said he became interested in the particular landscape of a zoo and how humans view creatures.
“Stories are often — and people are so often — so given to abstract things,” Mirza said. “We turn everything into a metaphor that selfishly reflects on our own lives, and that’s certainly how literature is also often interpreted.”
Mirza said he is interested in how the story uses and drives conflict in different ways, and he said he is curious about how readers think about it and react to it.
“For instance, the turmoil of being in an interracial relationship is a very common subject for many writers of color or immigrant writers,” Mirza said. “The failure to be understood completely by one culture or being stuck is a pretty resonant trope.”
Mirza said he was interested in how estranging the reader through what he described as the “weirdness” of the story might lead them to encounter new experiences of these conflicts. Furthermore, he said he is interested in seeing animals from a non-anthropomorphized lens.
“We are fundamentally unable to communicate between these other species, and yet we are so drawn to them. What does that say about us?” Mirza asked.
Mirza said he looks forward to hearing what readers think of the story.
“I felt like the story, when it was written, would be unappealing to a more general market, so it feels really special to be recognized for it and for it to be recognized for your own sort of strange instincts,” Mirza said.
