2023/24 Winner & Finalists

 Winner: The Hive and the Honey by Paul Yoon

Paul Yoon is the author of four previous works of fiction: Once the Shore, which was a New York Times Notable Book; Snow Hunters, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award; The Mountain, which was an NPR Best Book of the Year; and Run Me to Earth, which was one of Time magazine’s Must-Read Books of 2020 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in the Hudson Valley, New York.

Finalist: Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction—Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She has received many awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University.

Finalist: Other Minds and Other Stories by Bennett Sims

Bennett Sims was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He is also the author of the novel A Questionable Shape (2013), which received the Bard Fiction Prize, and the story collection White Dialogues (2017), winner of the Rome Prize for Literature 2018-19 and named a best book of 2017 by Bookforum. He is a recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society Fellowship. His fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Conjunctions, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Zoetrope: All-Story, as well as in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He has taught at Bard College, Grinnell College, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

The Story Prize Spotlight Award: The Goth House Experiment by SJ Sindu

The 12th winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award is The Goth House Experiment (Soho Press), a collection of six beautifully executed, inventive stories that stands out because its verve and originality. 

Beyond the three finalists The Story Prize announces each year, we honor an additional short story collection of exceptional merit with The Story Prize Spotlight Award. Winners 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 comes with a prize of $1,000.

SJ Sindu is a Tamil diaspora writer whose other works include the novels Marriage of a Thousand Lies (winner of the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and an ALA Stonewall Honor Book) and Blue-Skinned Gods (finalist for a Lambda Literary Award), as well as the graphic novel Shakti and the chapbooks I Once Met You But You Were Dead and Dominant Genes. Sindu holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The 2023/24 Story Prize Judges

• Critic and writer Merve Emre

• Librarian Allison Escoto

• Writer Tania James