Danticat Wins The Story Prize

Author Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat was presented with the inaugural Story Prize for her collection of stories The Dew Breaker (Knopf) at an awards ceremony held last night at the Symphony Space in New York City. Over 500 people attended the event, which was recorded as part of National Public Radio's Selected Shorts series. The other two finalists for this year's Story Prize were Cathy Day (The Circus in Winter, Harcourt) and Joan Silber (Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories, Norton).

Symphony Space Artistic Director Isaiah Sheffer hosted the program at which actors read short stories from the three finalists' collections. Jane Curtain read "My Shape" from Joan Silber's Ideas of Heaven, which was also a National Book Award finalist. Following Curtain, Kate Burton read "Circus People" from The Circus in Winter, and Sonia Manzano read Danticat's "The Book of Miracles."

Before the event, Danticat told BTW, "I'm honored to be chosen for this prize along with the great writers Cathy Day and Joan Silber, and it's great that the prize is incorporated with the Selected Short series, so [NPR] listeners can hear all the stories."

Julie Lindsey, founder of the prize, presented Danticat with an engraved silver bowl and a check for $20,000. Danticat thanked Lindsey and Robin Desser, her editor at Knopf, among others, and told the audience, "The most precious gift a writer can get is time." She added that the award "buys her a lot of time she can invest back in her work."

The prize was developed by Lindsey and Larry Dark, who serves as director of The Story Prize. Dark said that the objective of the prize was to win "further support for short story collections" and counter the increasing difficulty authors find in publishing collections of short fiction.

This year's Story Prize judges were Ann Christophersen of Chicago's Women & Children First, author Dan Chaon (You Remind Me of Me, Ballantine), and Brigid Hughes, executive editor of The Paris Review. --Karen Schechner