Jenny Minton Quigley

The O Henry Prize is an American short story award, for which 20 stories are chosen each year, and published in an anthology. It has now been running for over a century, since 2019, though there must have been various changes over the years and 2021 saw a number of significant changes, with the replacement of a judging panel by a guest editor and the opening up of the award to stories published in English translation from other languages.

Although many of the journals and literary websites submitting short stories for considerations are US based, and many of the writers live and work in the United States, this anthology, guest edited by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, has a more international flavour and feel than I expected, with stories from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe as well as the US and Canada. There are three stories by writers whose previous work I have read, and a couple more who I have heard of, but many authors are quite new to me and I would love to read more by several of them.

The stories cover a variety of subjects and themes, romantic and family relationships, at least one about what looks like a potential romance or at least summer fling that never really happens, about various jobs and lives around the world. I originally borrowed the anthology in order to read the story Colour and Light by Sally Rooney, set in a small Irish town, which I had previously listened to as an audio recording, but I was really interested in many of the others, including Brown Girls and Two Nurses, Smoking (both set in the US) and, Becoming the Baby Girl, about a student in Nigeria, learning how the apparently cool Tall Girls on her course afford their apparently glamorous clothes and lifestyle.

As well as the short stories, this book includes a lot of detail about how stories are submitted, read and selected for the prize, and background information for each story: s a mini interview about the writer's inspiration and some biographical information. This is useful and fascinating but the organisation of this content is rather frustrating, with the profiles in a separate section near the back of the book, and unlike the stories, arranged alphabetically by author name,. The details of where the stories were first published are listed separately. I would have preferred to have these story/author profiles and previous publication information with each story

I would love to read further volumes in this series, past or future, but am not sure I will get the opportunity.… (plus d'informations)