Fans of the short-story form may like to know that the three finalists were announced by the award’s director Larry Dark yesterday, for this year’s The Story Prize (an annual award which honours short story collections written in English and published in the US during the same calendar year), and it’s a surefire bet that the winner of the Prize this year is going to be a debut writer. And that’s because for the first time in the award’s history (it was founded in 2004), all three of the finalists are debut writers.
So, the three finalists, for those who may have missed the cover shots at the top 
are:
Now at this point I should be coming in with something clever and well-informed to say. Well I’m sorry but I’m going to have to let you down on this occasion. I do recognise Well’s Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned – mainly because it was on the 2009 shortlist for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. And I’ve also heard of Daniyal Mueenuddin. But that’s as far as it goes with me, as I’ve never read any of these collections so far.
All the links above are quite rightly so for the US editions of these books (because after all it is a US award), but all three of these titles are available freely in the UK (as one may expect with books that were published during 2009). Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is published in the UK by Bloomsbury, but only available in hardback at this time (they have a paperback edition coming in April). There is a UK paperback edition of Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, published by Granta (they also have it listed as a reissue for April 2010). And it appears, although it is available in the UK, that Victoria Patterson’s Drift is on US import only from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
So that’s the finalists in question, and the overall winner will be announced by The Story Prize founder – Julie Lindsey, at an event attended by all three authors at The New School in New York City, on Wednesday 3rd March. Good luck to all three!
In the meantime Larry Dark is promising to feature all of these finalists, along with some of the other notables from the 73 that he and Julie Lindsey had to read through in order to get to the final three, in the weeks leading up to the award ceremony. So it it may be a good idea keeping a close eye on The Story Prize blog until.
Finally, if anyone has read any of these three story collections that have made the final three, then I’d love to hear your opinion on them.
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