Press Play: Media Coverage of The Story Prize Event

Claire Vaye Watkins, Dan Chaon, and Junot Díaz backstage
photo © Beowulf Sheehan

Here are some press accounts of The Story Prize event on March 13, at which eventual winner Claire Vaye Watkins and fellow finalists Dan Chaon and Junot Díaz read from and discussed their work onstage at The New School:

Reuters

AP

Los Angeles Times

NPR

Reno Gazette-Journal

Shelf Awareness

Poets & Writers

Galley Cat

Like Fire (Open Letters Monthly)

Motherboard (Vice)

The Outlet (Electric Literature)

What The Story Prize Judges Had To Say About Dan Chaon's Stay Awake

photo © Beowulf Sheehan

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were Jane Ciabattari, Yiyun Li, and Sarah McNally. We include the citations in congratulatory letters we present to each finalist, along with their checks ($20,000 to the winner, $5,000 to the other two finalists). To protect the confidentiality of the judges' votes and the integrity of the process, we don't attribute citations to any particular judge.

Here’s what one judge had to say about Dan Chaon’s Stay Awake:

“The haunted characters in Dan Chaon’s Stay Awake haunted me—and kept me awake—long after I’d finished reading the last story. His beautifully crafted sentences perfectly evoke the anxious child buried deep within us all but also lingering just beneath the surface. Closing this book is like waking up from a disturbing dream you can’t quite remember. These stories got under my skin like few things I’ve ever read.”

What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say About Junot Díaz's This Is How You Lose Her

photo © Beowulf Sheehan

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were Jane Ciabattari, Yiyun Li, and Sarah McNally. We include the citations in congratulatory letters we present to each finalist, along with their checks ($20,000 to the winner, $5,000 to the other two finalists). To protect the confidentiality of the judges' votes and the integrity of the process, we don't attribute citations to any particular judge.

Here’s what one judge had to say about Junot Díaz’s This is How You Lose Her:

“Junot Díaz is a great writer, a blessing to the history of literature and to those of us lucky enough to watch his work unfold. His stories are infused with something that seems beyond the sum of their words. It may be simply style, which Proust calls the necessary condition to art. His work is so distinctive that if I didn't read another word by him for 50 years, in one sentence I would know him again. But it feels deeper than even style, it feels alchemical. When someone tells me they don’t appreciate Junot Díaz, I feel sad for them, as if they’ve told me they don’t like puppies, children, strangers, dancing, and friendship. His books are some of the most vital, enjoyable, smart art of our day, and This Is How You Lose Her shows that his talent is deepening and unfolding still.”

Video: The Story Prize Event on March 13, Dan Chaon, Junot Diaz, Claire Vaye Watkins

In case you missed it, here's video of The Story Prize event on March 13, at which we announced the winner for books published in 2012: Claire Vaye Watkins' Battleborn.

What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say About Claire Vaye Watkins' Battleborn

photo © Beowulf Sheehan

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were Jane Ciabattari, Yiyun Li, and Sarah McNally. We include the citations in congratulatory letters we present to each finalist, along with their checks ($20,000 to the winner, $5,000 to the other two finalists). To protect the confidentiality of the judges' votes and the integrity of the process, we don't attribute citations to any particular judge.

Here's what the judges had to say about Story Prize winner Claire Vaye Watkins' Battleborn:

“In the ten stories in her first collection, Claire Vaye Watkins takes an unflinching look  at the apocalyptic dimensions of our culture's boom-or-bust obsession. Her stories are set in the deserts and whorehouses and rockhound haunts of her home state of Nevada, long ago dubbed ‘Battle Born’ because it was founded during the Civil War. In her opening story,  ‘Ghosts, Cowboys,’ she delivers an artful and gutsy answer to the question, ‘How should a story begin?’, while writing of Reno’s Gold Rush days, the Spahn Ranch where 1950s Westerns were filmed, and the toxic love of the present-day narrator’s doomed parents. Watkins’s imaginative reach encompasses the ambivalent love of half-sisters, the grief at a mother’s suicide, the damage a Las Vegas party turned violent wreaks on two teenage girls, a young pregnant woman’s twisted connection to her own father, and the deadly repercussions of a nuclear test blast. She’s a fierce and original new writer, and Battleborn is an astonishing short story collection.”

“So rarely does a story collection triumph like a Beethoven symphony, so rarely is each story in the collection as ambitious as a novel, that readers of Battleborn must stop from time to time and wonder about its creator: what an audacious voice, what a visionary mind, what understanding—ruthless yet full of tenderness—she has toward her characters and the landscape they inhabit. Claire Vaye Watkins dazzles us with a perfect collection that is to be celebrated by lovers of short stories. What a glorious discovery!”

Pictures from The Story Prize Event on March 13

 All photos © Beowulf Sheehan

The finalists: Junot Díaz, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Dan Chaon

Dan Chaon reads from his collection Stay Awake

Claire Vaye Watkins discusses Battleborn
with Story Prize Director Larry Dark

Junot Díaz discussing This Is How You Lose Her—and more

Story Prize Founder Julie Lindsey, winner Claire Vaye Watkins, and Larry Dark

Claire Vaye Watkins' Battleborn Wins The Story Prize

photo © Beowulf Sheehan

The winner of The Story Prize for short story collections published in 2012 is Claire Vaye Watkins for Battleborn (Riverhead Books). Watkins takes home a check for $20,000 and an engraved silver bowl. The runners-up, Dan Chaon and Junot Díaz, each take home $5,000. All three deserve a big round of applause: They wrote great books that made our judges' decisions difficult.

Battleborn is a collection of 10 stories set in the American West. Settings range from the California Gold Rush of 1849 to the founding of Reno in 1859 to the abandoned movie set that housed the notorious Manson family in the late 1960s to recent times haunted by these past events. The collection’s title refers to the state motto of Nevada, the author’s home state, where many of the stories take place.

Claire Vaye Watkins is the ninth ever winner of The Story Prize and first woman to win since Mary Gordon for The Stories of Mary Gordon in 2007—the third year of the award. Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker was the first ever winner in 2005. Watkins is also the third debut author to win. The other two were Patrick O'Keeffe for The Hill Road in 2006 and Daniyal Mueenuddin for In Other Rooms, Other Wonders in 2010.

In the days ahead, here and on our Web site, we'll post citations from the judges, photos from the event and the after party, and links to media coverage.

One Week Away...

(Color Field image courtesy of Durston Saylor)