Bard Fiction Prize Winner Eliza Barry Callahan to Give Reading on October 5

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—Bard Fiction Prize winner Eliza Barry Callahan will give a public reading on campus as part of her ongoing residency at Bard during the fall 2026 semester. Callahan’s reading takes place at 5:30pm on Monday, October 5, in the Reem Kayden Center’s Lászlo Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium. The reading is free and open to the public. For more information, call 845-758-7087.

Callahan received the Bard Fiction Prize following the publication of her debut novel, The Hearing Test (Catapult Books, 2024). The novel’s narrator, an artist in her late twenties, awakens one morning with Sudden Deafness, an unexplained condition of hearing loss. “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,” the Bard Fiction Prize committee wrote last year when announcing Callahan’s award. “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.”

Callahan is a writer and filmmaker from New York, NY. The Hearing Test was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and longlisted for Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Her fiction and writing about art have appeared in The Paris Review, Bomb, frieze, and The Drift. Her 20-minute directorial debut, The Non-Actor, premiered at Toronto International Film Festival and at International Film Festival Rotterdam 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.

Presented each October since 2001, the Bard Fiction Prize continues the college’s longstanding position as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by both faculty and students. 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. Callahan will work on her second novel while at Bard this fall.

About the Bard Fiction Prize
The Bard Fiction Prize is awarded to a promising emerging writer who is an American citizen aged 39 years or younger at the time of application. In addition to a $30,000 cash award, the winner receives an appointment as writer in residence at Bard for one semester, without the expectation that they teach traditional courses. The recipient gives at least one public lecture and meets informally with students during the duration of their residency. The 2027 Bard Fiction Prize winner will be announced in October. For more information about the prize, visit bard.edu/bfp.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place and Massena properties, Bard’s campus consists of more than 1,200 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; advanced degrees through 14 graduate programs; 10 early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 166-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at the main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu. (09/17/26)
 

This event was last updated on 09-17-2026

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