The winner of this year’s Drue Heinz Literature Prize, The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories by Caroline Kim, is a captivating debut. Exploring what it means to be human through the Korean diaspora, Kim’s stories feature many voices. From a teenage girl in 1980’s America, to a boy growing up in the middle of the Korean War, to an immigrant father struggling to be closer to his adult daughter, or to a suburban housewife whose equilibrium depends upon a therapy robot, each character must face their less-than-ideal circumstances and find a way to overcome them without losing themselves. Language…

Caroline Kim of Walnut Creek, California is the 2020 winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, one of the nation’s most prestigious awards for a book of short stories. Kim’s The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories was selected by award-winning author Alexander Chee. The University of Pittsburgh Press will publish Kim’s collection this fall. “The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories is an extraordinary collection, and the title story alone is an astonishing feat, a fictional imagining of a haunting episode at court in medieval Korea, the problem of a prince who tries to murder his way…

Kate Wisel of Monona, Wisconsin, is the 2019 winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, one of the nation’s most prestigious awards for a book of short stories. Her manuscript Driving in Cars with Homeless Men was selected by National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee from a field of over 530 entries. Driving in Cars with Homeless Men will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press later this year. “You can hear the crackle of heat and the roar of a powerful fire burning through these pages,” said Lee. “Young angry women, brokenhearted mothers, and men who are…