The ceremony for the second annual Story Prize was held at the New School Auditorium last night, with all three nominees—Jim Harrison, Maureen McHugh, and Patrick O’Keeffe—on hand to read from their nominated works. In the end, it was O’Keeffe (left) and The Hill Road, four novellas linked by their setting in a fictional Irish village, that won the $20,000 grand prize for the most “outstanding collection of short fiction” published in the United States last year. McHugh’s Mothers & Other Monsters and Harrison’s The Summer I Didn’t Die earned runner-up prizes of $5,000. And, in a bit of fortuitous timing, you can read an essay by O’Keeffe about Alice Munro published earlier this week on my other blog, Beatrice. (McHugh, who made her own appearance on Beatrice a few months back, has promised me an essay on Joy Williams sometime soon.)
On our way to the reception, I congratulated O’Keeffe’s editor, Paul Slovak of Viking, for managing to find yet another award-winning talent (NBA recipient William T. Vollmann is one of his, too). “I fell in love with Patrick’s writing from the moment I saw it,” Slovak said, “and I really learned a lot as an editor working on this book with him.”