New: Click here for a Webcast of The Story Prize Award Night

Photo by Mercedes McAndrew

Widely respected short story writer and novelist, Jim Shepard, has won The Story Prize for his 2007 collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway, published by Alfred A.Knopf. At an event on February 27 at The New School, all three finalists read from their books and discussed their work onstage with Larry Dark, the Director of The Story Prize, before Founder Julie Lindsey announced the winner at the end of the program. The other finalists were Tessa Hadley for Sunstroke and Other Stories (Picador) and Vincent Lam for Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures (Weinstein Books). 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. The other two finalists, Hadley and Lam, each took home $5,000.

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.

Jim Shepard is the J. Leland Miller professor of English at Williams College. He is married to novelist Karen Shepard and is the author of six novels and two previous short story collections. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, McSweeney’s, A Public Space, and Tin House, among other places.

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