Story Prize Winner Announced

Jim Shepard

On Wednesday, February 27, the Story Prize held its fourth annual awards presentation recognizing books of short fiction. The winner of this year's prize is Jim Shepard, for the 2007 collection Like You'd Understand, Anyway (Knopf), which was also a National Book Award finalist.

Runners-up were Tessa Hadley for Sunstroke and Other Stories (Picador) and Vincent Lam for Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures (Weinstein Books). All three authors read from their work at the well-attended event at the New School's Tishman Auditorium in New York City.

Like You'd Understand, Anyway is a collection of 11 short stories set in disparate places and times, including the Soviet Union in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster and Paris post-French Revolution.

The $20,000 award Shepard received, in addition to an engraved silver bowl, is the largest first-prize amount of any annual U.S. book award for fiction. The other two finalists, Hadley and Lam, each took home $5,000.