We are delighted to announce that a generous donation from Julia Frey, widow of FC2 co-founder Ronald Sukenick, has enabled us to increase the cash prize associated with the annual Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest from $1,500 to $3,000. The $3,000 prize will go to the winner of next year’s (2026) contest, and the prize amount is expected to grow with inflation in the years to come. The 2026 contest will open to submissions on August 15. Sincere thanks to Julia Frey from FC2 and all recipients of the Sukenick Prize!
The Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest was established in 2007 with an earlier donation by Frey, administered by the University of Houston — Victoria. The prize is in memory of American writer Ronald Sukenick, whose novels and stories have been credited with breaking new literary ground. His work dealt playfully and self-referentially with the conventions of fiction. Mr. Sukenick tried to reflect what he saw as an American loss of faith in traditional values as expressed by the counterculture that evolved in the 1960’s.
Sukenick was born on July 14, 1932, in Brooklyn, where his father, Louis, was a dentist. He attended Midwood High School and Cornell and Brandeis Universities, receiving his doctorate in English literature in 1962. His thesis became his first published book, Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure (N.Y.U. Press, 1967), a study of the poet.
In 1956, Mr. Sukenick began his long teaching career as a lecturer at Brandeis. Later he taught at Hofstra, City College, Cornell, and Sarah Lawrence, and in France and Israel. From 1975 to 2002 he was a professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he was also Director of Creative Writing until 1977, and Director of the Publications Center from 1986 to 1999.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters gave him the Morton Zabel prize of $10,000, awarded every two years to innovative writers. Russell Banks, who presented the Zabel award, said, “Ronald Sukenick has methodically pushed the formal possibilities of American fiction to its limits and in the process has discovered illuminating new pathways to the center of the human psyche.”
His first novel, Up, was published in 1968 when he lived in the East Village, and his posthumous novel Last Fall, which he finished revising two weeks before his death, was published by FC2 in 2005. His novel Out was adapted as a film in 1982, featuring Danny Glover and Peter Coyote. His other novels include 98.6, Mosaic Man, and Cows.
At Cornell University, as an undergraduate, he was founding editor in 1953 of The Cornell Writer, a magazine in which a short story of his caught the unfavorable attention of school administrators, who threatened to suppress the publication and expel him. Sukenick founded The Fiction Collective, an avant-garde publishing house, and was founding editor of The American Book Review.
