Announcing the Winners of the 2025 Moment-Karma Fiction Contest!
Moment magazine is excited to announce the winners of the 25th annual Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest. This year’s entries were judged by Joan Leegant, the author of a novel and two short story collections, the first of which, An Hour of Paradise, was awarded the 2003 PEN Book Award and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.
The Moment-Karma first-place winner, “Niagara Falls,” is a tense narrative of a damaged family by Miryam Sivan, a writer and teacher at the University of Haifa who has lived in Israel for 20 years since leaving New York. Leegent wrote that the story is a “model of restraint and masterful craft.” Its obliqueness in backstories and untranslated German, Hebrew and Yiddish forces the reader to sit in the discomfort of this moody, cold family. “I was literally at the edge of my seat, worried for these kids,” Leegant says.
Second place went to “A Hot October Day,” a plucky and propulsive tale about a Hollywood Guru, Danny Groth, by writer and film producer Harris Kauffman. “Some Jews will try to tell you that Israel is our holy land,” Groth tells the young, hopeful narrator, “but it’s right here.” Gingerly focusing on October 7 with nuance and refraining from a simple ending make the story “moving and effective,” and more enjoyable after each reread, Leegant says.
The Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest was established in 2000 and has encouraged writers across the world to submit stories featuring Jewish culture, heritage or history. Many winners and finalists have gone on to publish novels and anthologies, with work appearing in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tablet, Haaretz and Moment’s own pages. Leegant herself won first place in the 2011 contest with her story “Roots,” then earned second place in 2018 with “The Eleventh Happiest Country.”
Past judges and special guests have included Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Safran Foer, André Aciman, Allegra Goodman, Geraldine Brooks, Dara Horn, Jami Attenberg, Max Brooks, Robert Pinsky, Walter Mosley, Nicole Krauss and Erica Jong.
Winners will be celebrated at a MomentLive! program on April 28. More details on the program will be forthcoming. The winning pieces will be published in Moment in the coming months.
Top image: Moment-Karma Fiction Contest winners Harris Kauffman (left) and Miryam Sivan (right).