Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead Books) has won the $20,000 Story Prize, which honors the author of an outstanding collection of short fiction and is underwritten by the Chisholm Foundation. The other finalists were Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King (Grove Press) and Think of Me by J. Robert Lennon (Graywolf Press), whose authors receive $5,000 each.
Story Prize director Larry Dark and founder Julie Lindsey selected the three finalists from among 119 short story collections published in 2021. The three judges--writer and librarian Dev Aujla, critic, writer, and librarian David Kipen, and writer Kirstin Valdez Quade--chose the winner.
The judges said that Brandon Taylor is "incredibly attuned to the slightest shift in the emotional weather in his characters and writes with absolute precision and compassion about their desires, vulnerabilities, failings, joys, and longings. His careful attention makes these very ordinary people extraordinary. His sentences are finely tuned, his language subtle and gorgeous.
"The writing feels like it has a familiarity with the narrative arcs of physical choreography. That it knows not only dance but how physical bodies moving throughout time can craft a story as rich as the one crafted by words. Bodies are being pushed to do things that are uncomfortable and fulfilling often in the same act."
Taylor is also the author of the novel Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He was also named a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and was named a 2022-2023 Fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
---
Gail McConnell won the €10,000 (about $10,915) John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, which recognizes an outstanding debut collection of poetry in the English language, for The Sun Is Open. The award is sponsored by the John Pollard Foundation and administered by the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin.
Chair of the judging panel Eoin McNamee said: "Out of a very strong shortlist the panel recognised the authority and lyric command of The Sun Is Open. Working on the very edge of what can be said, The Sun Is Open is both a work of adamantine witness and a patient unearthing of what is rare and beautiful. This is a work of gravity and importance and we are delighted to have the opportunity to acknowledge it."