Drue Heinz Literature Prize

Winner of the 2023 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

Winner of the 2021 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

Winner of the 2022 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

The Drue Heinz Literature Prize was established in 1980 to encourage and support the writing and reading of short fiction, and first awarded in 1981, to David Bosworth for his collection The Death of Descartes. Over the past forty years judges such as Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion, ...

Winner of the 2020 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

The first international winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize

Winner of the 2019 Drue Heinz Prize for Literature, selected by Min Jin Lee

Winner of the 2018 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Now in Paperback

WINNER OF THE 2016 DRUE HEINZ LITERATURE PRIZE Winner of the 2017 California Book Awards, first fiction category

Melissa Yancy’s personal experience in the milieus of hospitals, medicine, and family services infuse her narratives with a rare texture and gravity. Keenly observant, offering both sharp humor and humanity, these stories explore the ties that bind—both genetic and otherwise—and the fine line between the mundane and the maudlin. Whether the men or women that populate these pages are contending with illness, death, or parenthood, the real focus is on time and our inability to slow its progression, reminding us to revel in those moments we can control.

Winner of the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

This is a collection of unconventionally linked stories, each about a different young woman whose husband dies suddenly and unexpectedly. Ranging from traditional stories to lists, a quiz, a YouTube link, and even a lecture about creative writing, the stories grasp to put into words the ways in which we all cope with unspeakable loss.

Winner of the 2014 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

The flight path of The Spirit Bird traces many landscapes and different transitory lives. A young man scratches out a living from the desert; a woman follows a rarely seen bird in the far reaches of Alaska; a poor single mother sorts out her life in a fancy mountain town. Other protagonists yearn to cross a racial divide, keep developers from a local island, explore their sexuality, and mourn a lost loved one. The characters in this collection are compelled to seek beyond their own horizons, and as the stories unfold, the search becomes the expression of their desires. The elusive spirit bird is a metaphor for what we’ve lost, for what we hope for, and what we don’t know about ourselves.

Winner of the 2009 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

Winner of the 2010 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award

A compelling collection of short stories set in Saudi Arabia linked by various characters over a 50-year span, from the end of WWII to the mid-1990s. They’re native Saudis and expatriates going about their lives and loves and losses and discovering who they are and where they belong.

Winner of the 2008 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

Varallo’s short story collection gives voice to the disconnections of family and relationships, and the silent emotions that often speak louder than words. It tells of longings for meaningful expression and the complexities and escapism of human interactions that keep us from these truths.

Winner of the 2013 Drue Heinz Literature PrizeSelected by Amy Hempel

The Old Priest is a book of transformations. From the cigar-smoke-and-mirrors world of casino life, to the collection’s title character morphing into a goat-man before the narrator’s eyes, to a family drama upended by a miniature dinosaur in the backyard, Anthony Wallace writes about life-changing events. The characters seek to escape their earthly boundaries through artifice and fantasy, and those boundaries can be as elegant and fragile as a martini glass or as hardscrabble as an Indian reservation. The stories have to do with time and memory, and they convincingly open out beyond ordinary daily time to reveal something else—the present moment, perhaps, but a larger, more mysterious conception of it.

Winner of the 2002 Drue Heniz Literature Prize, this collection contains short stories set mostly in central Florida, populated by people living lives of disquieting longing and stubborn isolation.