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 Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li

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 Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li: 

“Profound loss and its aftermath permeate this elegant collection of stories by a truly gifted writer. The people in these captivating stories are all moving through grief: a woman on a solo trip to Europe after the death of her child. A temporary nanny guides a new, dubious mother through the turbulence of the early days of motherhood, knowing she will have to leave the baby to an uncertain fate. An elderly dying professor reminisces about the small but meaningful moments of her life as her caretaker looks back on the events that guided her to this moment in her life. These characters are indelible, the quiet moments of their lives described through beautiful language. They lead lives that are both compelling and relatable; they stay with you long after you leave their story.”

Presenting the 20th Trio of Finalists for The Story Prize: Yiyun Li, Bennett Sims, and Paul Yoon

Now in its 20th year, The Story Prize is pleased to honor as its finalists three outstanding short story collections chosen from 113 submissions representing 84 different publishers or imprints. The range of story collections published in 2022 was broad and the quality was high, and it was difficult to narrow the list down to three books, as it usually is. 

This year's finalists are: 

• Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

• Other Minds and Other Strories by Bennett Sims (Two Dollar Radio)

• The Hive and the Honey by Paul Yoon (Marysue Rucci Books)

Yiyun Li was also a finalist in 2011. We will announce the winner of The Story Prize on the evening of Tuesday, March 26, at a private event featuring readings by and interviews with finalists Li, Sims, and Yoon, as well as the announcement of the winner and acceptance of the $20,000 top prize and the engraved silver bowl that goes with it. The runners-up will each receive $5,000. We plan to live-stream the event starting at 7:30 p.m. and will post a link before then and a video the next day. 

Story Prize Founder Julie Lindsey and Director Larry Dark selected the finalists. Three independent judges will determine the winner:

• Critic and author Merve Emre;
• Librarian Allison Escoto; and
• Writer Tania James

In the weeks ahead, we'll announce this year's winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award. We'll also publish a long list of other exceptional collections we read last year and information on how to watch the event. And you can find a list of the story collections we received in 2023 on Bookshop.org.

Announcing The Story Prize Judges: Jane Ciabattari, Yiyun Li, and Sarah McNally

We're excited about this year's judges for The Story Prize: critic and writer Jane Ciabattari, award-winning author Yiyun Li, and bookseller Sarah McNally. All three have strong ties to The Story Prize. Jane Ciabattari, who recently served as president of the National Book Critics Circle, has attended the event for several years. Yiyun Li was a finalist for books published in 2010. And the bookstore that Sarah McNally established and operates—McNally Jackson Books in New York City—has sold books at The Story Prize event for the last three years. Past judges have included fiction writers Sherman Alexie, Andrea Barrett, Dan Chaon, Edwidge Danticat, David Gates, A.M. Homes, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Hannah Tinti; Booksellers Ann Chistophersen, Mitchell Kaplan, Rick Simonson, and Marie du Vuare; Librarians Nancy Pearl, Patricia Groh, and Bill Kelly; Editors John Freeman, Brigid Hughes, Daniel Menaker, and Meghan O'Rourke; critic James Wood; book bloggers Ron Hogan and Carolyn Kellogg; translator Breon Mitchell; and event curator Louise Steinman.   The judges play an important role in determining the winner of The Story Prize. They decide from among the three books that Story Prize Director Larry Dark and Julie Lindsey, the founder of the award, select from among the more than 80 books they receive as entries each year. The announcement of the finalists will come in January. The judges will then have about a month to read those selections and each vote for her top choices. The authors will appear at an event at The New School on March 13, 2013, and at the end of that, we'll announce the winner that Jane Ciabattari, Yiyun Li, and Sarah McNally have selected.

Paperback Writers: Of Seals and Tigers

The paperback edition of Anthony Doerr's Memory Wall, which won The Story Prize a few months ago, is out. We're always pleased when the official seal for the winner of The Story Prize appears on the cover. This version includes an added bonus: the story that won the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, "The Deep," which isn't included in the hardcover version.

The paperback edition of one of the other finalists for The Story Prize, Suzanne Rivecca's Death Is Not An Option, will be out in a few days. Personally, I miss the striking tiger/child's arm design* of the hardcover and don't really understand the multiple choice options the paperback presents. When in doubt, go with 'd.'

The paperback for the third finalist, Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, probably won't be out until September or so.

* Here's my theory: Since Rivecca's story collection came out last year, two tiger-themed books (The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht and Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua) hit the market and the best-seller list, causing Rivecca's publisher to back off from the Panthera tigris image. However, I think the actual tiger content in Death Is Not an Option stacks up pretty well against the competition.

The Story Prize Finalists Are Racking up the Honors

When Story Prize winners or finalists achieve other honors, we're always happy for them. We're pleased on a personal level because we get to know and like these authors. Further honors also reaffirm our choices. And we hope that the books that are finalists for or win The Story Prize get into as many readers' hands as possible. Every honor helps in that regard.

So I was excited when Anthony Doerr, who just won The Story Prize, also won the the £30,000* Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award for "The Deep." The story first appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story's Fall 2010 issue** and is in the April 10 edition of the Sunday Times Magazine.** Of course, I would have been equally excited if Yiyun Li, who was also a finalist for the Sunday Times Award, had won.

As it happens, this year's finalists have been racking up the honors since we held The Story Prize event on March 2. Yiyun Li and Suzanne Rivecca were also up for the Northern California Book Awards on Apr. 10. Suzanne was a finalist for PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction, is a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award (even though she's more of a tiger person), and also won a Rome fellowship in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.***

If there's any downside to our finalists and winners achieving other honors it's that certain prizes can overshadow† The Story Prize—but not too many of them, in our view. The Pulitzer Prize is one, and will announce its winners and finalists on April 18. Nonetheless, if Tony, Yiyun, or Suzanne win, we'll be very happy for them. Plus, one real test of a book award is how well its winners and finalists hold up over time, and winning other awards increases the chances that this will happen.

* The equivalent of $49,155 at current exchange rates. Though this eclipses the $20,000 top prize for The Story Prize, we've been mentioned in all of the press coverage and at least have the advantage of a decidedly more succinct name than The Sunday Times EFG Bank Short Story Award.

** It is not one of the stories in Memory Wall, The Story Prize winning collection. For now, you have to buy one-day access to the Sunday Times site for $2 or purchase the back issue of Zoetrope for $8 to read "The Deep." Coincidentally, that same issue of Zoetrope included a story by Mary Swan, whose "The Deep" was the first-prize winner in Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards. In that volume, 2006 Story Prize winner Mary Gordon introduced Swan's story. 
*** Anthony Doerr is a past winner.
† By this, I mean that it could supplant mention of The Story Prize on book covers and in author biographies.

Webcast: The Story Prize Awards Ceremony 2011 | The New School

The video for The Story Prize event on March 2 is up on The New School's YouTube page and will soon be on FORA.tv. The director of The New School's graduate writing program, Robert Polito, introduces the evening. The three finalists—Anthony Doerr, Yiyun Li, and Suzanne Rivecca—read from their work and discuss it onstage with the director of The Story Prize, Larry Dark. The event culminates with the announcement of the winner, Anthony Doerr for Memory Wall, by the founder of The Story Prize, Julie Lindsey.

Yiyun Li: What the Judges Had to Say About Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were bookseller Marie du Vaure, Granta editor John Freeman, and author Jayne Anne Phillips. 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 finalist Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl:

In deceptively simple prose, Li plumbs the depths of the human soul, managing through her lonely characters to put us in touch with our own yearnings. China is the setting for most of the stories in Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, but they could be happening anywhere, so strong is Li’s empathy for her characters and the universal sense of humanity she conveys. "Kindness," the long story that begins the collection, sets the tone for the entire book presenting a seemingly uneventful life that hones in on the utterly gripping interior drama of its narrator. Each story that follows opens gently like a flower and ends—to our astonishment—in full bloom. Li’s fine and careful work shows that simple can be profound and depth of feeling trumps elaborate machinations. To be so wonderfully in control and yet so keenly attuned to emotion is a rare gift indeed.

photo © Eric Richards 

Scenes from The Story Prize Event: Suzanne Rivecca, Anthony Doerr, and Yiyun Li

Finalists Suzanne Rivecca, Anthony Doerr, and Yiyun Li at the reception

We endeavor to make The Story Prize event a celebration of the short story form, and the three finalists—Anthony Doerr, Yiyun Li, and Suzanne Rivecca—were totally in the spirit of that yesterday. Even though one person is ultimately singled out, our intention is to honor all three authors equally until the moment of that announcement. Tony, Yiyun, and Suzanne were extraordinarily gracious and forthcoming in discussing their work. And all were great fun earlier in the day and at the reception afterwards, as well as being congenial and supportive of one another, as the photo above shows.

They also had a lot of interesting things to say.

Anthony Doerr, for instance, in answer to a question about the preponderance of older women in Memory Wall, talked about how his grandmother, who had Alzheimer's disease, came to live with his family when he was in high school and how, in his teenage self-absorption, he had been somewhat oblivious to her condition.

Yiyun Li discussed how her characters stubbornly resist being swept along by the tide of history—even though that often results in loneliness and isolation rather than the easy gratification and happiness that conformity can bring.

And Suzanne Rivecca revealed how a PBS show about Walt Whitman's first-hand experience of slavery when he traveled to New Orleans in 1848 and a trip her father had taken to the South in the 1960s, together spurred her to write a novel about Whitman's sojourn.

Thank you again, Tony, Yiyun, and Suzanne!

More pictures and links to coverage of the event will follow here, on our Web site, and via Twitter. And in a week or so, we'll post video of the evening

photo © Eric Richards

Next Stop for The Story Prize Finalists: Storyville

Exciting news: Each of the three finalists for The Story Prize—Anthony Doerr, Yiyun Li, and Suzanne Rivecca—will have a story from their nominated collections appear on Storyville in the weeks ahead, leading up to the March 2 event at The New School in New York city. What is Storyville? It's an app for iPad or iPhone that each week delivers a short story directly to a subscriber's device. The stories come from published collections, and an author statement accompanies them. The app also interacts with Twitter and Facebook.

The creator and publisher of Storyville, Paul Vidich, is no stranger to this blog. He has twice contributed guest posts about digital distribution. Most importantly, he's a a short story writer and evangelist, who spent more than a year developing the idea for this app.

The $4.95 price for a six-month subscription to Storyville allows readers to sample a substantial number of story collections. In this case, I hope a taste of Doerr's Memory Wall, Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, and Rivecca's Death Is Not an Option will lead readers to buy the books.

For our part, we're offering Storyville pairs of tickets to The Story Prize event to give away each week that one of these stories runs. That means a few subscribers will get to see the authors read from and discuss their work live on-stage, taking readers on a trip from the newest platform for stories to the oldest.

Presenting The Story Prize Finalists: Anthony Doerr, Yiyun Li, and Suzanne Rivecca

We're very excited to announce the three finalists for The Story Prize, which we selected from among 85 story collections submitted by 57 different publishers or imprints in 2010. They are:

• Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr (Scribner)
• Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li (Random House)
• Death Is Not an Option by Suzanne Rivecca (W.W. Norton)

It was another great year for short fiction, and the decision was, as always, a very difficult one to make. In the weeks to come we'll also present a long list of other notable story collections published in 2010, which will be hard to narrow down to a manageable number of books. 

The Story Prize event will take place at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in New York City at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 2. That night, the three finalists will read from and discuss their work on-stage. At the end of the event, Julie Lindsey will announce the winner.

Advanced tickets online through SmartTix or through the New School box office, by phone (212-229-5488) or email (boxoffice@newschool.edu). If you want to call for tickets, please note that the box office is closed until Jan. 24. After that, hours are from 4 to 7 p.m. Mon.-Thurs. and 3 to 6 p.m. on Fridays.

In the weeks ahead we'll be posting more about the finalists, their books, and the upcoming event. We'd especially like to thank the 71 authors who contributed guest posts to this blog. It was, to my mind, a successful experiment, and a we plan to do it again in 2011.

Yiyun Li on Writing Stories that Speak to Other Stories

In the 63rd in a series of posts on 2010 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Yiyun Li, author of Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (Random House), discusses how Irish author William Trevor's work serves as an inspiration for her own.

Describe one of the stories in your collection. 
The opening story of the collection, "Kindness," is a long story that was written to talk to William Trevor's novella, Nights at the Alexandra. "Nights at the Alexandra" is narrated by an older Irish man in a provincial town who has never married; "Kindness" is narrated by a middle-aged woman in Beijing who has chosen not only to stay single but also not to love anyone. I opened the story with three sentences that echoed the opening sentences of "Nights at the Alexandra," and while writing it, I imagined my narrator speaking to the narrator in Trevor's novella. Both characters stoically lead a solitary life, yet both are capable, and are proofs, of love and affection and loyalty. Their conversation would not have happened in reality, but I hope that by speaking to one person in mind, my narrator, in the end, speaks to many.

What is your writing process like? 
The seeds of many stories in the new collection came from newspapers. But oftentimes news reports either don't give you enough or give you the wrong things, and when that happens, I feel compelled to write a story to understand the situation better. "House Fire" was inspired by a brief report on six retired women setting up a business as private investigators, but who the women really were seemed not to be the journalist's concern, so I set out to create six women to understand their past and present. "The Proprietress," similarly, started when I read reports about a woman who asked to have a baby with a husband on death row. The reports, like the journalist in the story, focused on things that were less fascinating to me, so I started writing to understand the woman, but the story took on a new direction and the woman became a minor character. In general, I think I choose situations that fascinate or intrigue or baffle me, and I make up a set of characters to live through those situations so I can understand them better.

Have you had a mentor and who was it? 

William Trevor has been an influential writer and mentor to me. Just as "Kindness" was written to talk to "Nights at Alexandra," I like to imagine many of my stories having conversations with his stories (and many stories in the collection were written in that way, with a specific story of Trevor's in mind to begin with). I was talking to a friend one time about how it felt odd to see the publication of a book because writing was such a private business. My friend said that I should imagine that my books are out in the world to make some space for other writers I would like to see published and read, and I think that is exactly what Trevor's kindness and generosity mean to me: that his books have made space for my books to exist.