Story Prize Winner Announced

The Story Prize, established by Julie Lindsey and former O. Henry series editor Larry Dark, is designed to honor short fiction. The nominees for this first year are Edwidge Danticat (The Dew Breaker), Cathy Day (The Circus in Winter), and Joan Silber (Ideas of Heaven). The prize went to Edwidge Danticat. You can read the announcement in the Seatte PI. And Reuters has a report of the reading itself, at which the prizes were announced.

“I’m very honored,” Danticat told the Manhattan audience. She quipped that her companion at the event had just commented, “This is like the Oscars,” after actresses Jane Curtin, Kate Burton and Sonia Manzano read stories from the three finalists’ works.

“The most precious gift that a writer can get is time,” she said, noting that the cash prize, which organizers said was the largest of any annual U.S. book award, would buy “a lot of time, time that one can invest back into one’s work.”

Danticat is also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award.

Update: Ron “Where Does He Find The Time?” Hogan provides a write-up of the actual ceremony.