Awards: PEN/Malamud Short Story; Chautauqua Finalists

Shelf Awareness

Joy Williams has won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. The author of four collections of short fiction, four novels and two works of nonfiction, Williams will receive the $5,000 prize on December 2 at the Folger Shakespeare Library as part of the PEN/Faulkner Reading Series.

Richard Ford, a member of the selection committee, said, "Joy Williams' short stories are, sentence to sentence, incandescent, witty, alarming, often hilarious while affecting seeming inadvertence (but not really) in their powerful access to our human condition. She is a stirring writer and has long been deserving of the Malamud Award."
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The finalists for the 2016 Chautauqua Prize, which honors a book providing "a richly rewarding reading experience" and the author for "a significant contribution to the literary arts," are:

It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War by Lynsey Addario (Penguin Press)
Off the Radar: A Father's Secret, a Mother's Heroism, and a Son's Quest by Cyrus Copeland (Blue Rider Press)
King of the Gypsies: Stories by Lenore Myka (BkMk Press)
Granada: A Pomegranate in the Hand of God by Steven Nightingale (Counterpoint Press)
Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War by Susan Southard (Viking)
No. 4 Imperial Lane by Jonathan Weisman (Twelve Books)

The winner receives $7,500 and all travel and expenses for a one-week summer residency at Chautauqua.