2014/15 Winner & Finalists

 Winner: Thunderstruck by Elizabeth McCracken

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of Thunderstruck, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, The Giant's House, Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry, and Niagara Falls All Over Again. A former public librarian, she is now a faculty member at the University of Texas, Austin, and has received grants and awards from numerous organizations, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the American Academy in Berlin.

Finalist: The Other Language by Francesca Marciano

Francesca Marciano is the author of the short story collection The Other Language and the novels Rules of the Wild, Casa Rossa, and The End of Manners—all written in English. She has also has written and collaborated on several screenplays in her native Italian. She lives in Rome.

Finalist: Bark by Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore, after many years as a professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is now Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Among the honors Moore has received for her work are the Irish Times International Prize for Literature, a Lannan Foundation fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. Her most recent novel, A Gate at the Stairs, was shortlisted for the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction and for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Bark is her fourth short story collection.

The Story Prize Spotlight Award Praying Drunk by Kyle Minor

This year's winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award is Praying Drunk by Kyle Minor (Sarabande Books)—a visceral, intense, and formally innovative book of stories set in the American south and Haiti. Throughout the book, the author and his characters pose a series of questions—some profane and some profound—that thwart any hope of easy answers.

The Story Prize Spotlight Award is a $1,000 prize for a short story collection worthy of additional attention. This is not a judged prize—the Director and Founder of The Story Prize, Larry Dark and Julie Lindsey, select the winner at their discretion from among the regular pool of entries for The Story Prize. The winner of the Story Prize Spotlight Award might be the work of an emerging author, an established but overlooked author, or an innovator in the short story form.

The 2014/15 Story Prize Judges

• Arsen Kashkashian, the book buyer and general manager of the Boulder Book Store in Boulder, Colorado.
• Noreen Tomassi, Director of The Center for Fiction. 
• Laura van den Berg, author.