Debut author Claire Vaye Watkins—cited for her originality and the audacity of her voice—has won The Story Prize for Battleborn.

New York, NY—At the end of an evening of readings and conversation with the three finalists for The Story Prize, author Claire Vaye Watkins of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, took the stage and accepted the top prize of $20,000 for Battleborn (Riverhead Books), a collection of 10 stories set in the American West. Settings range from the California Gold Rush of 1849 to the founding of Reno in 1859 to the abandoned movie set that housed the notorious Manson family in the late 1960s to recent times haunted by such past events. The collection's title refers to the state motto of Nevada, the author's home state, where many of the stories take place.

The other finalists for The Story Prize were celebrated authors Dan Chaon for Stay Awake and Junot Díaz for This Is How You Lose Her.

Ms. Watkins is the ninth-ever winner of The Story Prize and the first woman to win the prestigious book award since Mary Gordon took the top prize for The Stories of Mary Gordon in 2007. The first woman to win was Edwidge Danticat for The Dew Breaker in 2005. Watkins is also the third debut author to win. The previous two were Patrick O'Keeffe for The Hill Road in 2006 and Daniyal Mueenuddin for In Other Rooms, Other Wonders in 2010. The four other winners have been Jim Shepard, Tobias Wolff, Anthony Doerr, and, most recently, Steven Millhauser.

At the event at The New School in New York City, this year's finalists read from and discussed their story collections with Larry Dark, Director of The Story Prize, before the founder of the prize, Julie Lindsey, announced Watkins as the winner. The $20,000 award she received remains the largest first-prize amount of any annual U.S. book award for fiction. As runners-up, Chaon and Díaz each received $5,000.

Dark and Lindsey selected the three finalists for The Story Prize from among 98 books entered in 2012, representing 65 different publishers and imprints. Three judges read the three short story collections Dark and Lindsey chose as finalists and voted to determine the winner of the award. They were:

Critic and author Jane Ciabattari;

Award-winning author Yiyun Li; and

Bookseller Sarah McNally, founder and owner of McNally Jackson Books.

Established in 2004, The Story Prize annually honors the author of an outstanding collection of short fiction. Books by living authors, written in English and published in the U.S. in a calendar year are eligible.

The Director of The Story Prize, Larry Dark, served as Series Editor for the annual Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, from 1997 to 2002, and has edited four other anthologies of short fiction. An eighteen-member Advisory Board offers support and advice. The Story Prize was established by Julie Lindsey and is underwritten by the Chisholm Foundation.

2011 Winner Steven Millhauser

Steven Millhauser “Most American writers begin with the short story and then become novelists — for them, the short story is a kind of apprenticeship. My own history is backward: I began as a novelist and later turned to the short story. Exactly why this is so remains mysterious even to me. But the crucial thing is that I didn’t turn to the story as a form of preparation for something larger or more important — on the contrary, it’s as if the novel were a kind of preparation for the rigorous pleasures of the shorter form. For me, the shortness of a great story is part of its greatness. In any case, I love and revere this form of writing, and hold it second to no other form.”