Drue Heinz Literature Prize

Winner of the 2012 Drue Heinz Literature PrizeSelected by Sven Birkerts

The spine of this collection is a series of linked stories about Ruth Stein, a Brooklyn author whose first book has exposed her father’s abuses; while the voice here, speaking across a lifetime, ranges from bittersweet to humorous to lethal. Elsewhere, Bosworth explores the extended family, the bonds of friendship, an apocalyptic Vermont, the rank yet redeemable Gowanus Canal; also rites of passage, race relations, divorce, middle-aged romance, dementia, funerals, alcoholism, and the Jewish religion.

Winner of the 1996 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

To author Edith Pearlman, “The stories in Vaquita aim at an intimacy between writer and reader. That imagined reader wants to know who loves whom, who drinks what, and, mostly, who answers to what summons. Thank Heavens for Spike Lee! Before his movies writers and critics had to natter about moral stances; now I can say with a more tripping tongue that my characters are people in peculiar circumstances, aching to Do The Right Thing if only they can figure out what The Right Thing is. If not, they’ll at least Do Their Own Right Thing Right.”

Winner of the 2011 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

Told in precise, evocative prose that skewers the heart of the matter time after time, these memorable stories view and illuminate the human condition from a compelling, funny and entirely original perspective.

Winner of the 2010 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

This book offers a very different kind of short fiction, blending story with verse to evoke fantasy, allegory, metaphor, love, body, mind, and nearly every sensory perception.

Winner of the 2006 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

The stories explore America’s obsession with news and entertainment culture. In the title story, a theme park has attractions where visitors relive actual news events such as “OJ’s Bronco: The Ride”, and “Seige at Waco”.

Between Camelots is about the struggle to forge relationships and the spaces that are left when that effort falls short. The stories are not only about loss and fear, but also about the courage that drives us all to continue to reach out to the people around us.

Winner of the 2005 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the Outstanding Achievement Award from Wisconsin Library Association, and the New Writers Award from Great Lakes College Association.

Winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, this set of interconnected stories center around a retired prize fighter living in Las Vegas. The characters are as unforgettable and intriguing as the dialogue.

Winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, selected by Rick Moody, this collection contains vignettes about people struggling with the cascading effects of seemingly inconsequential mistakes.

To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for ashort fiction, John Wideman has compiled an anthology featuring stories from each of the past winners.

Winner of the 1999 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the nine stories in this selection are full of quirky, complex, and vividly drawn characters who live on the margins of New York society.

Winner of the 2000 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, selected by Frank Conroy. Inter-connected short stories about a family with roots in a remote Italian mountain village.

Winner of the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Fado and Other Stories is filled with narrative and character grounded in the meaning and value the earth gives to human existence. Katherine Vaz is never afraid to confront her subject’s ambiguities and her characters’ conflicts – the simultaneous joy and sorrow of some of life’s discoveries, the pain sometimes hidden within passion and pleasure.

The stories in this extraordinary collection are set in Northern Ireland, specifically Belfast, the center for more than thirty years of fighting between Roman Catholic nationalists and Protestants loyal to the British crown. Cornell’s stories explore the emotional and psychological consequences of the struggle to endure not only violence, but loss, failure, and the inability to believe.

Winner of the fifteenth annual Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Dangerous Men contains a wide variety of distinct voices, peculiar characters, and odd settings, with tantalizing emphasis on lonliness, loss, and the ever-present struggle to find one’s place in the world. These are stories you will not forget.

Winner of the 1985 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. This book is characterized by narrative vitality and emotional range. In Wetherell’s stories a suburban retiree’s assumptions about the ethos of Long Island life are challenged and dismissed by a younger generation, a young English woman achieves miracles by dancing with wounded soldiers during World War II, a tennis-mad bachelor plays an interior game as real to him as an actual match, and a black drifter converts an Asian couple to his bleak vision of American life and finds strange kinship with them.