Video of The Story Prize Event: Yiyun Li, Bennett Sims, and Paul Yoon (winner)—plus 20th Anniversary Highlights

Here's the edited video of The Story Prize event held on March 26, 2024. It begins with highlights from the first 19 years of the award.

What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say About The Hive and the Honey by Story Prize Winner Paul Yoon

photo © Beowulf Sheehan

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they write citations for their top choices. This year's judges were critic and writer Merve Emre, librarian Allison Escoto, and writer Tania James. 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 The Hive and the Honey by Yiyun Li: 

“The seven stories in The Hive and the Honey are uncanny tales of loss and longing. A mother loses a child. A child loses a father. One man loses his home. Another loses his sense of time. Each loss is experienced by the character as a private or secluded grief, but Paul Yoon excavates grief's historic dimensions, revealing the long-lived aftershocks of the Korean War. The genius of the collection lies in its steadiness of style—Yoon's prose is quiet and fine and, at times, painfully precise—and its variety of genre. Domestic realism sits alongside folk tales, ghost stories, and imperial histories. The present is haunted by the past, and the past is violently and beautifully summoned in the present.” 

“The Hive and The Honey is a collection of astonishing breadth, offering a panoramic portrait of Korean diaspora, of lives rescued from the margins of history. Here we encounter a samurai tasked with protecting an orphan boy; a haunted Korean settlement in Far East Russia; men and women fleeing brutal pasts, seeking connection or safety. And yet these characters are more elusive than can be summarized. They reveal themselves most acutely through intimate gestures: a girl inviting a bee to her teacup, a kid licking at the blood from his own broken nose, a man coming home from war with vegetable seeds tucked into his chest pocket. Such moments infuse the ordinary with lasting wonder and could only be achieved by a writer as patient, curious, and masterful as Paul Yoon.”

The 20th Winner of The Story Prize Is The Hive and the Honey by Paul Yoon!

photo © Beowulf Sheehan

As announced at a private event that was broadcast live, the winner of The Story Prize for books published in 2023 is Paul Yoon for The Hive and the Honey (Marysue Rucci Books). The other finalists were Yiyun Li for Wednesday’s Child (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Bennett Sims for Other Minds and Other Stories (Two Dollar Radio). The Story Prize’s $20,000 top prize is among the largest first-prize amounts of any annual U.S. book award for fiction. As runners-up, Li and Sims each received $5,000. The evening began with the showing of a short video featuring highlights from the first 19 years of the award.

The Hive and the Honey, is Yoon’s fifth book of fiction and his third short story collection. The judges cited the book for its widely varied settings, skillful prose, profundity, and restrained but poignantly evocative tone

Director Larry Dark and Founder Julie Lindsey selected the three finalists for The Story Prize, now in its 20th year, from among 113 short story collections published in 2023, representing 84 different publishers or imprints. Three judges—critic and writer Merve Emre; librarian Allison Escoto, and writer Tania James—determined the winner from among the three books chosen as finalists.

The Story Prize Longlist for Story Collections Published in 2023

At The Story Prize, we announce our shortlist of three finalists first—as we did a few weeks ago—then release our longlist later. The three finalists, The Story Prize Spotlight Award winner (which we recently announced), and the longlist combine to highlight 20 books. Here are the books published in 2023 that we've chosen:

        •  Temple Folk by Aaliyah Bilal (Simon & Schuster)
        •  Witness by Jamel Brinkley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
        •  I Meant It Once by Kate Doyle (Algonquin Books)
        •  The Faraway World by Patricia Engle (Avid Reader Press)
        •  Elsewhere by Yan Ge (Scribner)
        •  After the Funeral by Tessa Hadley (Alfred A. Knopf)
        •  Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny (Alfred A. Knopf)
        •  The Best Possible Experience by Nishanth Injam (Pantheon)
        •  So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan (Grove Press)
        •  Disruptions by Steven Millhauser (Alfred A. Knopf)
        •  I Am My Country by Kenan Orhan (Random House)
        •  The Disappeared by Andrew Porter (Alfred A. Knopf)
        •  This Is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara (W.W. Norton)
        •  The People Who Report More Stress by Alejandro Varela (Astra House)
        •  Dearborn by Ghassan Zeineddine (Tin House)
        •  The Sorrows of Others by Ada Zhang (A Public Space)

Last year, The Story Prize received 113 books published by 84 different publishers or imprints. We read more worthwhile short story collections than is practical to include on our longlist, and it was very difficult to narrow down the choices. (That's why we take extra time to do some rereading before releasing our list.) As always, we believe that every writer who writes and publishes a short story collection has accomplished something significant and deserves a ton of credit. 

We've put together a Bookshop list of all the story collections that we received in 2023, many more worth reading than can fit on our longlist. We'll announce the 20th winner of The Story Prize on March 26 at a private event featuring readings by and interviews with the three finalists—Yiyun Li, Bennett Sims, and Paul Yoon. Before then, we'll provide links to watch the program live or online in the days that follow the announcement of the winner.

Announcing the 2023 Story Prize Judges: Merve Emre, Alllison Escoto, and Tania James!

(L to R) Merve Emre, Allison Escoto, and Tania James

Each year The Story Prize enlists three judges to choose the winner from among the three short story collections we select as finalists and annunce in January. In alternating years one of the judges is bookseller and one is a librarian. One judge is always a short story writer, and the third can be a critic, editor, or academic.

The judges who will choose the 20th winner of The Story Prize in March 2024 are critic and writer Merve Emre, head librarian at The Center for Fiction Allison Escoto, and novelist and short story writer Tania James. We didn't aim to have all three judges be women. It just turned out that this was the best group of judges we felt we could assemble this year—a pretty impressive bunch.

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Personality Brokers (selected as one of the best books of 2018 by The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and The Spectator), The Ferrante Letters (winner of the 2021 PROSE award for literature), and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.

Allison Escoto is the head librarian and director of education at The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn. She has worked as a librarian for more than twenty years in various libraries in and around New York City. She also reviews books for Booklist and serves on the ALA RUSA Notables committee. From 2017-2020, she was the Associate Editor for Newtown Literary Journal, a publication dedicated to featuring writers from her beloved Queens.

Tania James is the author of four works of fiction, most recently Loot (Knopf), which was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award in fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Freeman’s; Granta; The New Yorker; O, The Oprah Magazine; and One Story, among other places, and featured on Symphony Space Selected Shorts. An associate professor of English in the MFA program at George Mason University, she lives in Washington, D.C.