Fiction MFA Wins Prose Award

“Now you smoke the shisha when you’re waiting for him to come home after he’s gone down on his Lithuanian girlfriend. She has a thin nose and blue eyes. You smell her on his breath—a scent strangely like the papaya-flavored tobacco you smoked once.”

Sahar Mustafah, MFA student in the Fiction Writing Department, has won the first place Guild Literary Complex Prose Award for Fiction for her story “Shisha Love.” Her prize was announced at a reading and awards ceremony held at the Chopin Theatre on October 24. A monetary award accompanied the honor. Sahar started her story in a fiction writing class taught by Chris DeGuire.

For more than 20 years, the Guild Literary Complex has been a community- based literary organization presenting and supporting diverse, divergent, and emerging voices through innovative programs including performances and readings.

Previous winners of awards from the organization have included Fiction Writing alumi Chelsea Laine Wells and Robert W. Hobson. Originating in her Prose Forms class, “Into the Eye of You” by Wells won a non-fiction award in 2005 and was published in Hair Trigger 28; Hobson’s “Camel in the Wire,” a story about an incident that happened in Kuwait, nine years after the  ’91 war, won in 2011.

Please join the Fiction Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago in extending our heartfelt congratulations to this talented student.