Writing Student Nicole Saldarriaga Shortlisted for Master's Review Winters Short Story Award

By
Angeline Dimambro
May 21, 2021

Second-year Writing student Nicole Saldarriaga was recently shortlisted for the 2021 Master's Review Winters Short Story Award for New Writers for her story, “Araucaria.”

The fifteen finalists will have their stories read by author Helen Oyeyemi, who will select three winning entries. Oyeyemi is the author of the story collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours (Picador, 2016), winner of the PEN Open Book Award, and six novels, including Gingerbread and Boy (Riverhead Books, 2019) and Boy, Snow, Bird (Riverhead Books, 2015), which was a finalist for the 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

The Masters Review is a platform for emerging writers that publishes fiction and nonfiction online year round. They also publish an annual anthology of the ten stories that are judged by an expert in the field as representing the country’s best new writers. Additionally, the Review regularly publishes articles and book reviews on their blog, as well as organizes workshops that connect emerging and established writers.

The three winners of the Short Story Award will receive publication and a cash prize, and all winning stories and notable Honorable Mentions will have their pieces reviewed from an impressive roster of notable literary agencies and management companies.

Nicole Saldarriaga headshot

Nicole Saldarriaga is a second-year student in the Writing Program at Columbia University. She has a degree in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and has written professionally for numerous online publications. Before attending Columbia, Saldarriaga worked as a high school English teacher. She has been a member of the Interdisciplinary Arts Council at the School of the Arts since 2019 and served as the IAC’s President for the 2020-2021 academic year. She currently writes the Soon After First Light series for the School of the Arts, in which she interviews Columbia’s accomplished writing professors about craft and process amid the pandemic.