The O. Henry Award is an American prize given every year to short stories of very high quality. The award is named after the American short-story writer O. Henry.
The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories is an annual collection of the year’s twenty best short stories published in U.S. and Canadian magazines. Along with The Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories is one of the two most well-known annual collections of short fiction.
Before 2002, the award had first, second, and third place winners. From 2003 to 2019, three judges each chose a short story of special interest or quality. The collection is called The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and the earlier version was named Prize Stories 1919: The O. Henry Memorial Awards.
History and format
The award was first given in 1919 and supported by the Society of Arts and Sciences.
As of 2021, the guest editor selects twenty short stories each year. These stories are called O. Henry Prize stories. Stories published in American or Canadian magazines can be considered for the prize, even if they were originally written in another language and translated into English. The goal of The O. Henry Prize Stories is to help improve the skill of writing short stories.
The current series editor for The O. Henry Prize Stories is Jenny Minton Quigley. Previous series editors include: Blanche Colton Williams (1919–32), Harry Hansen (1933–40), Herschel Brickell (1941–51), Paul Engle (1954–59), Mary Stegner (1960), Richard Poirier (1961–66, with help from William Abrahams, 1964–66), William Abrahams (1967–96), Larry Dark (1997–2002), and Laura Furman (2003–2019). There were no books published in 1952 and 1953 because Herschel Brickell passed away, and also in 2004 and 2020.
In 2022, the series began including stories from African magazines.
Partnership with PEN American Center
In 2009, Anchor Books, the publisher of The O. Henry Prize Stories, changed the name of the series with the help of the PEN American Center (now known as PEN America). This partnership created the first collection called PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Money earned from the 2009 collection would support PEN's Readers & Writers Program, which brings famous authors to schools in cities that need more help.
The collection included stories by Graham Joyce, John Burnside, Roger Nash, Manuel Muñoz, Ha Jin, Paul Theroux, Judy Troy, Nadine Gordimer, Marisa Silver, Paul Yoon, Andrew Sean Greer, and Junot Díaz. A. S. Byatt, Tim O'Brien, and Anthony Doerr—authors who had previously won O. Henry Prize Stories awards—served as the judges for the prize.
In an interview for the Vintage Books and Anchor Books blog, editor Laura Furman described the partnership with PEN as a "natural partnership."