The Story Prize, now in its 20th year, is pleased to honor as its finalists three highly original and skillful short story collections chosen from 113 submissions representing 84 different publishers or imprints:
Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Other Minds and Other Stories by Bennett Sims (Two Dollar Radio)
The Hive and the Honey by Paul Yoon (Marysue Rucci Books)
Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li is a collection of eleven beautiful stories that ruminate on profound existential questions, Bennett Sims’s Other Minds and Other Stories is a volume of a dozen inventive narratives that explore the slippery slopes of self-consciousness, and The Hive and the Honey by Paul Yoon presents seven meticulous stories set in far-ranging times and places that survey the contours of otherness.
Our three judges—critic and author Merve Emre; Librarian Allison Escoto; and writer Tania James—will determine the winner.
On March 26, The Story Prize will livestream a private event that will feature readings by and interviews with each of the three finalists, culminating in the announcement of the winner, who will receive $20,000 and an engraved silver bowl. The two runners-up will each receive $5,000. A link to the livestream will be available via The Story Prize website and social media.
About The Authors
Photo by Basso Canarsa/Agence Opal
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.
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.
Photo by Peter 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.
The Story Prize Spotlight Award
We’re pleased to announce the 12th winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award, The Goth House Experiment by SJ Sindu (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.
LING MA’S BLISS MONTAGE WAS THE 19th AND MOST RECENT WINNER OF THE STORY PRIZE, ANNOUNCED IN MARCH 2023
About The Story Prize
Past winners have been Edwidge Danticat, Patrick O'Keeffe, Mary Gordon, Jim Shepard, Tobias Wolff, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Anthony Doerr, Steven Millhauser, Claire Vaye Watkins, George Saunders, Elizabeth McCracken, Adam Johnson, Rick Bass, Elizabeth Strout, Lauren Groff, Edwidge Danticat (a second time), and, most recently, Deesha Philyaw.
The deadlines for submitting 2022 books are July 15 for books published in the first half of the year and Nov. 15 for books published in the second half. You can find a list of short story collections submitted for The Story Prize in 2022 at Bookshop.org.
