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O. Henry Award

Annual award for exceptional short stories

Summary

Annual award for exceptional short stories

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name	O. Henry Award
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awarded_for	Short story awards
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country	United States
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The O. Henry Award is an annual American award given to short stories of exceptional merit. The award is named after the American short-story writer O. Henry.

The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories is an annual collection of the year's twenty best stories published in U.S. and Canadian magazines. Along with The Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories is one of the two "best-known annual anthologies of short fiction."

Until 2002 there were first, second, and third prize winners and from 2003 to 2019 there were three jurors who each selected a short story of special interest or merit; the collection is called The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and the original collection was called Prize Stories 1919: The O. Henry Memorial Awards.

History and format

The award was first presented in 1919 and funded by the Society of Arts and Sciences.

the guest editor chooses twenty short stories, each an O. Henry Prize story. All stories published in an American or Canadian periodical are eligible for consideration, including stories that have been translated into English. The goal of The O. Henry Prize Stories remains to strengthen the art of the short story.

The current series editor for The O. Henry Prize Stories is Jenny Minton Quigley. Past series editors have been: Blanche Colton Williams (1919–32), Harry Hansen (1933–40), Herschel Brickell (1941–51), Paul Engle (1954–59), Mary Stegner (1960), Richard Poirier (1961–66, assisted by William Abrahams, 1964–66), William Abrahams (1967–96), Larry Dark (1997–2002) and Laura Furman (2003–2019). There were no volumes of the series in 1952 and 1953 (due to Herschel Brickell's death), 2004 and 2020.

Partnership with PEN American Center

In 2009 The O. Henry Prize Stories publisher, Anchor Books, renamed the series in partnership with the PEN American Center (today PEN America), producing the first PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories collection. Proceeds from the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009 would be directed to PEN's Readers & Writers Program, which sends well-known authors to under served inner-city schools.

The selection included stories by Graham Joyce, John Burnside, Roger Nash, Manuel Muñoz, Ha Jin, Paul Theroux, Judy Troy, Nadine Gordimer, Marisa Silver, Paul Yoon, Andrew Sean Greer, and Junot Díaz, with A. S. Byatt, Tim O'Brien and Anthony Doerr – all authors of past O. Henry Prize Stories – serving as the prize jury.

In an interview for the Vintage Books and Anchor Books blog, editor Laura Furman called the collaboration with PEN a "natural partnership".

First-prize winners (1919–2002)

Year	Author	Title	Publication	Ref.	1919	1920	1921	1922	1923	1924	1925	1926
	England to America	**, September 1918
	Each in His Generation	Scribner's Magazine, July 1920
		Everybody's Magazine, January 1921
	Snake Doctor	Cosmopolitan, November 1922
	Prelude	Harper's Magazine, May 1923
		McCall's, June 1924
	Mr. Bisbee's Princess	Redbook, May 1925
	Bubbles	Harper's Magazine
	Child of God	Harper's Magazine, April 1927
		Redbook, March 1928
	Big Blonde	Bookman Magazine, February 1929
	Dressing-Up	Harper's Magazine, November 1929	date=1930-11-07	title=TWO WRITERS IN TIE FOR O. HENRY AWARD; W.R. Burnett and William M. John Share $500 Prize for Best Magazine Story in 1929.	language=en-US	work=The New York Times	url=https://www.nytimes.com/1930/11/07/archives/two-writers-in-tie-for-o-henry-award-wr-burnett-and-william-m-john.html	access-date=2023-02-26	issn=0362-4331	archive-date=2021-06-03	archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210603113155/https://www.nytimes.com/1930/11/07/archives/two-writers-in-tie-for-o-henry-award-wr-burnett-and-william-m-john.html	url-status=live }}
	Neither Jew nor Greek	**, August 1929
	Can't Cross Jordan by Myself	Pictorial Review
		Pictorial Review, February 1932
	Gal Young Un	Harper's Magazine, June-July 1932
	No More Trouble for Jedwick	Esquire
		Harper's Magazine
	Total Stranger	**, February 15, 1936
		**
		Harper's Magazine
	Barn Burning	Harper's Magazine
	Freedom's a Hard-Bought Thing	**
	Defeat	**
		Harper's Magazine
	Livvie is Back	**
	Walking Wounded	**
		**
	Bird Song	**
		Harper's Magazine
	Shut a Final Door	**
		**
		Harper's Magazine
		Epoch
No edition
No edition
		**
	In the Zoo	**
		**
	Greenleaf	**
	In Sickness as in Health	**
	Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time	**
		**, Winter 1958–59
	Tell Me a Riddle	New World Writing
	Holiday	**, December 1960
	Everything That Rises Must Converge	New World Writing
		**, November 3, 1962
	Revelation	**, Spring 1964
		**, March 13, 1965
	In the Region of Ice	**, August 1966
		**, November 26, 1966
	Man in the Drawer	**, April 1968
		**, January 11, 1969
	Twin Bed Bridge	**, May 1970
	Strange-Dreaming Charlie, Cow-Eyed Charlie	**, March 20, 1971
		McCall's, July 1971
	Brownstone	**, January 27, 1973
		**, September 17, 1973
	Usurpation (Other People's Stories)	Esquire, May 1974
	His Son in His Arms, in Light, Aloft	Esquire, August 1975
		**, July 26, 1976
	Last Courtesies	Harper's Magazine, July 1976
		**, May 2, 1977
	Getting Serious	**, Fall 1977
		**, September 25, 1978
		**, May 26, 1980
	Facing Front	Epoch, Winter 1980
		Ploughshares
	Rosa	**, March 21, 1983
	Hot Ice	Antaeus
	Lily	**
	Kindred Spirits	Esquire, August 1985
	Fleur	Esquire, August 1986
		Harper's Magazine, July 1986
	Errand	**, June 1, 1987
	Peacocks	**, Winter 1988
		TriQuarterly, Winter 1989
		**, June 11, 1990
	Puttermesser Paired	**, October 8, 1990
		**, December 2, 1991
	Better Be Ready 'Bout Half Past Eight	**, January 1993
		New England Review, Spring 1994
		**, October 31, 1994
	City Life	Ploughshares
	People Like That Are the Only People Here	**, January 27, 1997
		**
	Weight	**
		**
		McSweeney's

Juror favorites (2003–2019)

Year	Author	Title	Publication	Ref.	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008
		, June 3, 2002
	Train Dreams	, Summer 2002
No award
	What You Pawn I Will Redeem	, April 21, 2003
	Refuge in London	Zoetrope: All-Story, Winter 2003
	Mudlavia	, September 2003
	Window	Tin House, Spring 2004
	Old Boys, Old Girls	, May 3, 2004
	Passion	, March 22, 2004	title=Alice Munro	url=https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alice-Munro	access-date=2023-02-26	website=Britannica	language=en	archive-date=2021-04-04	archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210404154655/https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alice-Munro	url-status=live }}
	Galveston Bay, 1826	Manoa, Winter 2004
		, May 16, 2005
	What Do You Want To Know For?	**
	Folie a Deux	**
	Touch	Tin House
	Wildwood	**
		**
	Oh, Death	, Spring 2009
		, September 15, 2008
		, December 15, 2008
	Sunshine	Narrative Magazine
	Something You Can't Live Without	Oxford American
	Your Fate Hurtles Down at You	Electric Literature
	Kindness	**
	Corrie	**
		Tin House
	Your Duck Is My Duck	Fence
		Tin House
		Granta
		Tin House
	Opa-locka	**
	Birdsong from the Radio	Zoetrope: All-Story
	Cabins	Subtropics
		**
	Irises	**
	Train to Harbin	**
	Winter, 1965	BOMB
	Too Good to Be True	Harper's
	Secret Lives of the Detainees	**
	Buttony	**
		Tin House
	Counterblast	**
	Funny Little Snake	**
	Girl of Few Seasons	Ploughshares Solos
	Omakase	**

Guest editor (2021–present)

Year	Editor	Ref.	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025

References

"Short and Sweet" by Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly, 11/05/99, issue 511, page 73.
"Penguin Random House".
Kunitz, Stanley J.. (1942). "Twentieth Century Authors". The H. W. Wilson Company.
Itzkoff, Dave. [http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/o-henry-prize-pen-announce-partnership/ "O. Henry Prize, PEN Announce Partnership"] {{Webarchive. link. (2009-04-16 , "[[The New York Times]] Arts Beat", 2009-04-07.)
[http://vintageanchor.blogspot.com/2009/04/two-literary-lions-merge.html "Two Literary Lions Merge"], "[[Vintage Books]]", 2009-04-10.
"The O. Henry Prize Past Winners".
(1930-11-07). "TWO WRITERS IN TIE FOR O. HENRY AWARD; W.R. Burnett and William M. John Share $500 Prize for Best Magazine Story in 1929.". [[The New York Times]].
"John Updike".
"Alice Walker".
"Alice Munro".
(2019-05-16). ""Omakase"".
"The O. Henry Prize Collection".
(2022-04-04). "Announcing the Winners of the 2022 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction".

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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