The Story Prize is an annual book award established in 2004 that honors the author of an outstanding collection of short fiction with a $20,000 cash award. Each of two runners-up receives $5,000. Eligible books must be written in English and first published in the United States during a calendar year. The founder of the prize is Julie Lindsey, and the director is Larry Dark. He was previously series editor for the annual short story anthology Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards from 1997 to 2002.
Publishers, authors, or agents may enter a short story collection written in English by a living author and published in the U.S. during a calendar year. Three finalists are announced in January. These authors participate in an award event, typically in March, at which they read from their work and have an on-stage discussion with Dark. At the end of the event, Julie Lindsey announces the winner, who, in addition to the prize money, receives an engraved silver bowl. From 2006 to 2020 the event was at the New School in New York City (co-sponsored with the Creative Writing Department). In 2021, the event was recorded via Zoom, and it has since been held at The Lotos Club.
In March 2019, Catapult published The Story Prize: 15 Years of Great Short Fiction, an anthology celebrating the award's fifteenth anniversary. [1]
Year | Author | Title | Result | |
---|---|---|---|---|
2004 | Edwidge Danticat | The Dew Breaker | Winner | |
Cathy Day | The Circus in Winter | Finalist | [2] | |
Joan Silber | Ideas of Heaven | |||
2005 | Patrick O'Keeffe | The Hill Road | Winner | [3] |
Jim Harrison | The Summer He Didn't Die | Finalist | [3] | |
Maureen F. McHugh | Mothers and Other Monsters | |||
2006 | Mary Gordon | The Stories of Mary Gordon | Winner | |
Rick Bass | The Lives of Rocks | Finalist | ||
George Saunders | In Persuasion Nation | |||
2007 | Jim Shepard | Like You'd Understand, Anyway | Winner | [4] |
Tessa Hadley | Sunstroke and Other Stories | Finalist | [4] | |
Vincent Lam | Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures | |||
2008 | Tobias Wolff | Our Story Begins | Winner | [5] |
Jhumpa Lahiri | Unaccustomed Earth | Finalist | [5] | |
Joe Meno | Demons in the Spring | |||
2009 | Daniyal Mueenuddin | In Other Rooms, Other Wonders | Winner | [6] [7] |
Victoria Patterson | Drift | Finalist | [6] [7] | |
Wells Tower | Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned | |||
2010 | Anthony Doerr | Memory Wall | Winner | [8] [9] |
Yiyun Li | Gold Boy, Emerald Girl | Finalist | [8] | |
Suzanne Rivecca | Death Is Not an Option | |||
2011 | Steven Millhauser | We Others | Winner | [10] |
Don DeLillo | The Angel Esmeralda | Finalist | ||
Edith Pearlman | Binocular Vision | |||
2012 | Claire Vaye Watkins | Battleborn | Winner | |
Dan Chaon | Stay Awake | Finalist | [11] | |
Junot Díaz | This Is How You Lose Her | |||
2013 | George Saunders | Tenth of December | Winner | [12] [13] |
Andrea Barrett | Archangel | Finalist | [13] | |
Rebecca Lee | Bobcat | |||
2014 | Elizabeth McCracken | Thunderstruck | Winner | [14] [15] |
Francesca Marciano | The Other Language | Finalist | [15] | |
Lorrie Moore | Bark | |||
2015 | Adam Johnson | Fortune Smiles | Winner | [16] |
Charles Baxter | There’s Something I Want You to Do | Finalist | [16] | |
Colum McCann | Thirteen Ways of Looking | |||
2016 | Rick Bass | For a Little While | Winner | [17] |
Anna Noyes | Goodnight, Beautiful Women | Finalist | [17] | |
Helen Maryles Shankman | They Were Like Family to Me (published in hardcover as In the Land of Armadillos ) | |||
2017 | Elizabeth Strout | Anything Is Possible | Winner | [18] |
Daniel Alarcón | The King Is Always Above the People | Finalist | [18] [19] | |
Ottessa Moshfegh | Homesick for Another World | |||
2018 | Lauren Groff | Florida | Winner | |
Jamel Brinkley | A Lucky Man | Finalist | ||
Deborah Eisenberg | Your Duck Is My Duck | |||
2019 | Edwidge Danticat | Everything Inside | Winner | [20] |
Kali Fajardo-Anstine | Sabrina & Corina | Finalist | [20] | |
Zadie Smith | Grand Union | |||
2020 | Deesha Philyaw | The Secret Lives of Church Ladies | Winner | [21] |
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum | Likes | Finalist | [21] | |
Danielle Evans | The Office of Historical Corrections | |||
2021 | Brandon Taylor | Filthy Animals | Winner | [22] [23] |
Lily King | Five Tuesdays in Winter | Finalist | [23] | |
J. Robert Lennon | Let Me Think | |||
2022 | Ling Ma | Bliss Montage | Winner | [24] |
Andrea Barrett | Natural History | Finalist | [25] | |
Morgan Talty | Night of the Living Rez | |||
2023 | Paul Yoon | The Hive and the Honey | Winner | |
Yiyun Li | Wednesday's Child | Finalist | [26] | |
Bennett Sims | Other Minds and Other Stories |
This $1,000 award is given to a short story collection of exceptional merit, as selected by the Director of the Story Prize, from among all entrants. Winners of The Story Prize Spotlight Award might be promising works by first-time authors, collections in alternative formats, or works that demonstrate an unusual perspective on the writers’ craft.
The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, formerly the Samuel Johnson Prize, is an annual British book prize for the best non-fiction writing in the English language. It was founded in 1999 following the demise of the NCR Book Award. With its motto "All the best stories are true", the prize covers current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. The competition is open to authors of any nationality whose work is published in the UK in English. The longlist, shortlist and winner is chosen by a panel of independent judges, which changes every year. Formerly named after English author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the award was renamed in 2015 after Baillie Gifford, an investment management firm and the primary sponsor. Since 2016, the annual dinner and awards ceremony has been sponsored by the Blavatnik Family Foundation.
The Journey Prize is a Canadian literary award, presented annually by McClelland and Stewart and the Writers' Trust of Canada for the best short stories published by an emerging writer in a Canadian literary magazine. The award was endowed by James A. Michener, who donated the Canadian royalty earnings from his 1988 novel Journey.
The PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction is awarded annually to a full-length novel or book of short stories by an American author who has not previously published a full-length book of fiction. The award is named after Ernest Hemingway and funded by the Hemingway family and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/Society. It is administered by PEN America. Mary Welsh Hemingway, a member of PEN, founded the award in 1976 both to honor the memory of her husband and to recognize distinguished first books of fiction.
Anthony Doerr is an American author of novels and short stories. He gained widespread recognition for his 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, "American Psyche", to The Guardian's weekend magazine between 2006 and 2008.
This is a list of recipients and nominees of the Governor General's Awards award for English-language poetry. The award was created in 1981 when the Governor General's Award for English language poetry or drama was divided.
Robert Olen Butler is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.
Zoetrope: All-Story is an American literary magazine that was launched in 1997 by Francis Ford Coppola and Adrienne Brodeur. All-Story intends to publish new short fiction. Zoetrope: All-Story has received the National Magazine Award for Fiction.
Elizabeth McCracken is an American author. She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award.
Daniyal Mueenuddin is a Pakistani-American author who writes in English. His short story collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, has been translated into sixteen languages, and won The Story Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and other honors and critical acclaim.
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is a collection of short stories written by Pakistani-American author Daniyal Mueenuddin, who has also worked as a journalist, lawyer and a businessman. His book has won The Story Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and other honors and was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize and the 2009 National Book Award.
Kyle Minor is an American writer. Born and raised in West Palm Beach, Florida, Minor lived in Ohio and Kentucky before settling in Indiana. He studied writing at Ohio State University, where he was a three-time honoree in The Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Awards and a winner of the 2012 Iowa Review Prize for Short Fiction and Random House's Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers contest, and at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he reported on the 2012 United States presidential election for Esquire.
The PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection is awarded by the PEN America "to exceptionally talented fiction writers whose debut work — a first novel or collection of short stories ... represent distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise." The winner is selected by a panel of PEN Members made up of three writers or editors. The PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize was originally named the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. The prize awards the debut writer a cash award of US$25,000.
Larry Dark has been the director of The Story Prize—a U.S. book award for short story collections—since its inception in 2004. He served as series editor of the O. Henry Awards for the 1997–2002 volumes. He has also compiled, edited, and introduced five other literary anthologies.
Laura van den Berg is an American fiction writer. She is the author of five works of fiction. Her first two collections of short stories were each shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, in 2010 and 2014. In 2021, she was awarded the Strauss Livings Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Carmen Maria Machado is an American short story author, essayist, and critic best known for Her Body and Other Parties, a 2017 short story collection, and her memoir In the Dream House, which was published in 2019 and won the 2021 Folio Prize. Machado is frequently published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed, and other publications. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Her stories have been reprinted in Year's Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, The New Voices of Fantasy, and Best Women's Erotica.
Krys Lee is a Korean-American author based in South Korea, a journalist, and translator. She wrote the short story collection Drifting House (2012) and the novel How I Became a North Korean (2016). She is an associate professor of creative writing and literature at Underwood International College, Yonsei University. She was awarded the Rome Prize, the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and the Honor Title in Adult Fiction Literature from the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association, and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the BBC International Story Prize.
Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She also works as Social Media Manager and Associate Editor for Escape Pod.
Arinze Ifeakandu is a Nigerian writer known for the collection of his short stories, God's Children Are Little Broken Things, which won the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize for the US and Canada, and was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize, the Lambda Awards, and received the Story Prize's Spotlight Award. He also won an O. Henry Prize for one of the stories.
God's Children Are Little Broken Things was a short story collection written by Nigerian author Arinze Ifeakandu and published by A Public Space in 2022. It provides nine distinct "stories about the joys and tribulations of queer love in contemporary Nigeria".