Jim Shepard Wins The Story Prize

Posted on February 29, 2008

Jim Shepard has won the fourth annual Story Prize for his collection of short stories called Like You'd Understand, Anyway. The Story Prize is a $20,000 award.

The three finalists each received $5,000. They include: Tessa Hadley's Sunstroke and Other Stories and Vincent Lam's Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures.

The award is given annually for "an outstanding work of short fiction." The $20,000 award Shepard received, in addition to an engraved silver bowl, is the largest first-prize amount of any annual U.S. book award for fiction.

Here is what The Story Prize had to say about Shepard's short story collection.

Like You'd Understand, Anyway, Shepard's third short story collection, encompasses eleven narratives, each set in a different time and place, including: the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, an outpost in Britannia in the late Roman empire, a Nazi expedition in Tibet, high-school-football-mad contemporary Texas, an 1840 expedition to the center of Australia, ancient Greece at the battle of Marathon, and Paris during the reign of terror that followed the French Revolution. Previous collections have featured similarly diverse settings and characters, meticulously researched and convincingly portrayed.