When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were writer and librarian Dev Aujla, critic, writer, and librarian David Kipen, and writer Kirstin Valdez Quade. 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 Five Tuesdays in Winter (Grove Press) by Lily King:
“Each story in Five Tuesdays in Winter has the resonance of a novel, yet each also maintains the satisfying arc of a short story. Lily King’s language is beautiful and evocative without being showy and is always at the service of the story. Her ability to create empathy for her protagonists is, in many cases, skillfully wrought through the perspective of someone reckoning—often wistfully—with past events. These retrospective views don’t necessarily capture the most transformative moment in a person’s life, but they do capture powerful and telling experiences, the kind of memories, tinged with longing, we’re drawn to frequently.
“The last story, 'The Man at the Door,’ is a different kind of story entirely. It’s playful, inventive, funny, and at times scary—like another King, Stephen, filtered through a woman’s sensibility. But there’s also a seriousness to it. As Cyril Connolly famously stated: ‘There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.’ Easy for a man to say! Women writers live this experience. And that’s what connects ‘The Man at the Door’ to the other, tonally different stories that precede it—that sense of lives lived imperfectly, regrets and all, that Five Tuesdays in Winter so generously and consistently captures.”
