The winner of the 2022 Story Prize for books published in 2021 is Brandon Taylor for his short story collection Filthy Animals (Riverhead). One of the largest first prize amounts of any annual U.S. book award for fiction, the Story Prize comes with a $20,000 purse. Runners-up Lily King, author of Five Tuesdays in Winter (Grove), and J. Robert Lennon, author of Think of Me (Graywolf), will each receive $5,000.
The Story Prize, established in 2004 and underwritten by the Chisholm Foundation, annually honors an outstanding collection of short fiction. Story Prize director Larry Dark and founder Julie Lindsey selected the three finalists from among 119 short story collections published in 2021, representing a combined 90 publishers and imprints. Three judges—writer and librarian Dev Aujla; critic, writer, and librarian David Kipen; and writer Kirstin Valdez Quade—determined the winner. In a joint statement, the judges praised Taylor's attention to "the slightest shift in the emotional weather in his characters," as well as his "precision," "compassion," and "finely tuned" sentences.
Taylor's first book, the novel Real Life (Riverhead), was a finalist for the Booker Prize. He was recently named a 2022-2023 Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.. Filthy Animals is his second book.
