Steven Millhauser’s We Others: New & Selected Stories is the winner of The Story Prize for books published in 2011.

Winner of The Story Prize Steven Millhauser
[Photo by Beowulf Sheehan]

Finalist Don DeLillo [Photo by Beowulf Sheehan]

Finalist Edith Pearlman [Photo by Beowulf Sheehan]

“Most American writers begin with the short story and then become novelists — for them, the short story is a kind of apprenticeship. My own history is backward: I began as a novelist and later turned to the short story. Exactly why this is so remains mysterious even to me. But the crucial thing is that I didn’t turn to the story as a form of preparation for something larger or more important — on the contrary, it’s as if the novel were a kind of preparation for the rigorous pleasures of the shorter form. For me, the shortness of a great story is part of its greatness. In any case, I love and revere this form of writing, and hold it second to no other form.”

New York, NY—At the end of an evening of readings and conversation with the three finalists for The Story Prize, author Steven Millhauser of Saratoga Springs, New York, took the stage and accepted the top prize of $20,000 for his collection We Others, a book that includes seven newly collected pieces alongside fourteen stories selected from previous collections. The finalists for The Story Prize were a formidable group this year and also included critically acclaimed author Don DeLillo, for his first short story collection, The Angel Esmeralda, and Edith Pearlman for Binocular Vision, which has been a finalist for and winner of several other book awards. All three books included new and selected stories from several decades’ worth of work.

At the event, the three authors read from and discussed their story collections with Larry Dark, Director of The Story Prize, before the founder of the prize, Julie Lindsey, announced Millhauser as the winner. The $20,000 award he received remains the largest first-prize amount of any annual U.S. book award for fiction. As runners-up, DeLillo and Pearlman each received $5,000.

Millhauser is renowned for both his short stories and novels. He is the author of four previous story collections and seven novels, including Edwin Mullhouse and Martin Dressler: The Life and Times of an American Dreamer, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. His work has been translated into fifteen languages, and his story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” was the basis of the 2006 film The Illusionist. He teaches at Skidmore College.

Dark and Lindsey selected the three finalists for The Story Prize from among 92 books entered in 2011, representing 60 different publishers and imprints. Three judges read the three short story collections Dark and Lindsey chose as finalists and voted to determine the winner of the award. They were:

• Author and film-maker Sherman Alexie of Seattle;

• Breon Mitchell, a translator, professor of comparative literature, and Director of the Lilly Library at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana; and

• Louise Steinman, author and curator of the Los Angeles Public Library’s ALOUD series of readings and discussion.

Established in 2004, The Story Prize annually honors the author of an outstanding collection of short fiction. Books by living authors, written in English and published in the U.S. in a calendar year are eligible. Past winners include: Edwidge Danticat, Patrick O’Keeffe, Mary Gordon, Jim Shepard, Tobias Wolff, Daniyal Mueenuddin, and Anthony Doerr.

The Director of The Story Prize, Larry Dark, served as Series Editor for the annual Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, from 1997 to 2002, and has edited four other anthologies of short fiction. A seventeen-member Advisory Board offers support and advice to The Story Prize. The award was established by Julie Lindsey and is underwritten by the Chisholm Foundation.

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