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.
TSP
The official blog of The Story Prize
Friday, March 29, 2024
Wednesday, March 27, 2024
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.”
What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say About Wednesday's Child by Yiyun Li
photo © Beowulf Sheehan |
“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.”
What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say About Other Minds and Other Stories by Bennett Sims
photo © Beowulf Sheehan |
“Bennett Sims is an original. There are no other stories like the stories in Other Minds and Other Stories (except perhaps those in his previous collection). The book amounts to an intense and artful exploration of the difficulty of truly understanding other minds, and as such also serves as a deep dive into the question of individual identity, of the mind that is seeking to understand. Some of the stories seem to be as much essays or philosophical explorations as they are fiction and unfurl via a single, long unbroken paragraph, a form that echoes the work of the great W.G. Sebald. Sims is extremely erudite with an expansive vocabulary, but his choice of words never seems strained. Other Minds is a collection that challenges the reader but also offers satisfactions comparable to cracking a code or solving a puzzle. When you get it, you get it. These stories invite you to engage, to join the enquiry—and they never condescend. It is an impressive high-wire act, a reading experience unlike any other.”
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
The 20th Winner of The Story Prize Is The Hive and the Honey by Paul Yoon!
photo © Beowulf Sheehan |
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.
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
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)
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.
Thursday, February 1, 2024
The Goth House Experiment by SJ Sindu Wins The Story Prize Spotlight Award
In addition to naming three finalists each year, we also present The Story Prize Spotlight Award to a collection of exceptional merit. Selected books can be promising works by first-time authors, collections in alternative formats, or works that demonstrate an unusual perspective on the writer's craft. The award includes a prize of $1,000.
We're pleased to announce that the winner for books published in 2023 is The Goth House Experiment by SJ Sindu, published by Soho Press. These six inventive stories, perfectly executed, stood out from the pack.
Photo by Sarah Bodri |
This is the 12th time we've given out The Story Prize Spotlight Award. The nine previous winners were: Drifting House by Krys Lee, Byzantium by Ben Stroud, Praying Drunk by Kyle Minor, Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine, Him, Me, Muhammad Ali by Randa Jarrar, Subcortical by Lee Conell, Half Gods by Akil Kumarasamy, The Trojan War Museum by Ayşe Papatya Bucak, Inheritors by Asako Serizawaand, Born Into This by Adam Thompson, and, most recently, God's Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu.
You can find links to all eleven books, including Sindu's, on Bookshop, in the list Winners of The Story Prize Spotlight Award.
We'll announce the winner of The Story Prize on March 26 at a private event, which we'll live stream, featuring readings by and interviews with the three finalists: Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li, Other Minds and Other Stories by Bennett Sims, and The Hive and the Honey by Paul Yoon. And soon we'll post a long list of short story collections published in 2023.