The judges of the 2008 Story Prize were announced on Sunday night. Daniel Menaker and Hannah Tinti, both authors and editors of the form, and bookseller Rick Simonson will select the winner of the award, which honors a short story collection from three finalists that will be chosen by Story Prize director Larry Dark and founder Julie Lindsey.
Menaker has served as fiction editor of the New Yorker, for which he is still a contributor, and spent twelve years as an editor at Random House. He is the author of two collections of short stories, Friends and Relations (Doubleday, 1976) and The Old Left (Knopf, 1987), and a novel, The Treatment (Knopf, 1998). Since March, Menaker has hosted Titlepage, an online program featuring roundtable discussions with authors.
Tinti is the editor of One Story, which publishes a single short story in chapbook form each month. Her debut story collection, Animal Crackers (Dial Press, 2004), was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her first novel, The Good Thief (Dial Press), a finalist for the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, was published in August.
Bookseller Rick Simonson has worked at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, where he established an international reading series, since 1976. He is also a founding board member of Copper Canyon Press and has served on advisory panels for organizations such as the American Booksellers Association. Simonson’s column Mist Place appears on Publishersweekly.com.
The finalists for the Story Prize, given to the author of a collection of short fiction written in English and first published in the United States, will be announced during the second week of January. The winner, revealed at a ceremony later next year, will receive twenty thousand dollars. The two runners-up will each receive five thousand dollars.
