The Plaza Prizes are even bigger and better in 2025. We have the best judges in the world and the cash prizes aren’t too shabby either. You could win £1000 / *$1250, and publication in our audio anthology, for your audio story.

Our 2025 judge is Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer, Junot Diaz.

Junot was born in the Dominican Republic in 1968 and raised in New Jersey. He studied English at Rutgers University. His novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has written two collection of short stories: Drown, and This Is How You Lose Her, which was a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist.

Junot Diaz served for many years on, and was elected Chairman of, The Pulitzer Prize Board.

This is How You Lose Her is a collection of absolutely cracking short stories. If you’ve ever heard Junot read from his stories, you will understand why he is the perfect judge for our new Audio Story competition. He is enchanting, has a fantastic facility with voice, and brings the stories to life in a way that surpasses even the experience of reading them for oneself.

Junot Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review , and is the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the co-founder of Voices of Our Nation Workshop, a community-based organization that puts writers of color, their narratives, voices, and experiences at the center of all conversations.

So please do experiment with a new form, and send our judge, Junot Diaz, your audio stories. To be long-listed (that’s the final 20) is an achievement. To be shortlisted in the Top 10, or place second or third, or win will be a validation of your skills, and get you published in The Plaza Prizes Audio Anthology, in 2025.