Awards: Rea Short Story; RBC Bronwen Wallace

Jim Shepard has won the $30,000 2016 Rea Award for the Short Story, given to "a writer who has made a significant contribution to the discipline of the short story form." Rea is the author of five short story collections and seven novels. The World to Come: Stories was published by Knopf earlier this year.

The judges wrote in part that Shephard has "proved himself an original, darkly funny, and deeply humane writer. His prodigious research combined with a kind of X-ray vision of the soul produces stories that we learn from, that improve us, that expand our sense of what a life can be. He is a master of stance and throwaway wit. His scholarship and surpassing imagination work in tandem in matchless stories that glorify the commonplace and understate the extraordinary. He reveals people--not 'characters'--through sports, history, dogs, drama, the Hindenburg. He sees the everyday violence of family life as both a given and an illimitable mystery. He shows us the world as it could have been, as it is, and, to cite his most recent collection: The World to Come."

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The Writers' Trust of Canada has announced finalists for the CA$10,000 (about US$7,270) RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, which is presented to writers under the age of 35 who are unpublished in book form and alternates each year between poetry and short fiction. This year's poetry finalists are Tyler Engstrom for "after thoughts," Domenica Martinello for "All Day I Dream About Sirens" and Noor Naga for "The Mistress and the Ping." The winner will be announced May 30 in Toronto.

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