Annual Bard Fiction Prize Is Awarded to Eliza Barry Callahan
Eliza Barry Callahan. Photo by E. Josey
Author Eliza Barry Callahan has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her first novel, The Hearing Test (Catapult Books, 2024). Callahan’s residency at Bard College is for the fall 2026 semester, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students. Callahan will give a public reading at Bard during her residency.
The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “Eliza Barry Callahan’s novel The Hearing Test begins, like Kafka’s Metamorphosis, with a character waking up in the morning having mysteriously, existentially changed overnight: ‘I had been struck by Sudden Deafness.’ As the unnamed narrator navigates a medical labyrinth hoping to cure her abrupt hearing loss, she thinks: she thinks about sound, she thinks about silence, she thinks about noise, signal, and music, and the ranges between them. It is a novel of ideas, in which the ideas are not decorative elements or passengers in the vehicle but the story’s essential characters, the active agents driving the narrative. It’s a novel that blurs the lines between fiction and essay and between internal and external, in pitch-perfect prose that uses precision as a form of lyricism and vibrates in the inner ear like the tines of a tuning fork.”
“To be read with closeness and care is an ultimate gift,” said Callahan. “Rivaling that gift is the gift of time, and rivaling the gift of time is the gift of space, and well, of course the gift of the gift . . . To receive this is an honor. I am grateful for (and excitedly await) the opportunity to commune with and work on my second novel next fall alongside the students and faculty at Bard.”
Eliza Barry Callahan is a writer and filmmaker from New York, NY. Her debut novel, The Hearing Test, published in Spring 2024 (Catapult) was a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Awar and longlisted for Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Her fiction and writing about art has appeared in The Paris Review, Bomb, frieze, and The Drift. Her 20 minute directorial debut, ‘The Non-Actor’, premiered at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in 2025. She was a 2023 New York Foundation of The Arts Fellow and currently teaches a seminar on artist writings and ekphrasis at Columbia University.
The creation of the Bard Fiction Prize, presented each October since 2001, continues Bard’s long-standing position as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by both faculty and students. From Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison to John Ashbery, Philip Roth, William Weaver, and Chinua Achebe, Bard’s literature faculty, past and present, represents some of the most important writers of our time. The prize is intended to encourage and support young writers of fiction, and provide them with an opportunity to work in a fertile intellectual environment. The 2025 Bard Fiction Prize was awarded to Maya Binyam for her first novel, Hangman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023).
Post Date: 10-15-2025
The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “Eliza Barry Callahan’s novel The Hearing Test begins, like Kafka’s Metamorphosis, with a character waking up in the morning having mysteriously, existentially changed overnight: ‘I had been struck by Sudden Deafness.’ As the unnamed narrator navigates a medical labyrinth hoping to cure her abrupt hearing loss, she thinks: she thinks about sound, she thinks about silence, she thinks about noise, signal, and music, and the ranges between them. It is a novel of ideas, in which the ideas are not decorative elements or passengers in the vehicle but the story’s essential characters, the active agents driving the narrative. It’s a novel that blurs the lines between fiction and essay and between internal and external, in pitch-perfect prose that uses precision as a form of lyricism and vibrates in the inner ear like the tines of a tuning fork.”
“To be read with closeness and care is an ultimate gift,” said Callahan. “Rivaling that gift is the gift of time, and rivaling the gift of time is the gift of space, and well, of course the gift of the gift . . . To receive this is an honor. I am grateful for (and excitedly await) the opportunity to commune with and work on my second novel next fall alongside the students and faculty at Bard.”
Eliza Barry Callahan is a writer and filmmaker from New York, NY. Her debut novel, The Hearing Test, published in Spring 2024 (Catapult) was a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Awar and longlisted for Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Her fiction and writing about art has appeared in The Paris Review, Bomb, frieze, and The Drift. Her 20 minute directorial debut, ‘The Non-Actor’, premiered at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in 2025. She was a 2023 New York Foundation of The Arts Fellow and currently teaches a seminar on artist writings and ekphrasis at Columbia University.
The creation of the Bard Fiction Prize, presented each October since 2001, continues Bard’s long-standing position as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by both faculty and students. From Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison to John Ashbery, Philip Roth, William Weaver, and Chinua Achebe, Bard’s literature faculty, past and present, represents some of the most important writers of our time. The prize is intended to encourage and support young writers of fiction, and provide them with an opportunity to work in a fertile intellectual environment. The 2025 Bard Fiction Prize was awarded to Maya Binyam for her first novel, Hangman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023).
Post Date: 10-15-2025