Congratulations to Kirsten Lunstrum, this year’s winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction! The competition continues to be a celebrated route to publication for literary short fiction collections, and UGA Press is glad to have Lunstrum carry on this tradition.
Kirsten Lunstrum’s What We Do with the Wreckage will be published by the University of Georgia Press in the fall of 2018.
Lunstrum’s short fiction has previously appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, the American Scholar, Ploughshares Solos, and Willow Springs, as well as other journals. She has been the recipient of a PEN/O. Henry Prize and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Jack Straw Writers Program. Her two published collections of short fiction are This Life She’s Chosen (Chronicle Books, 2005) and Swimming with Strangers (Chronicle Books, 2008). She teaches high school English at an independent school near Seattle.
Flannery O’Connor series editor Lee K. Abbott on Lunstrum’s collection: “Blessed with a tongue as sharp as her eye, Kirsten Lunstrum is an astonishingly mature teller of tales, keen to both fair and right about our tribe between margins, sensitive to subtlety and nuance, and unafraid of the dark truths that must be brought to light. Friends, you will not read a smarter, more stylish, or more fetchingly well-told collection of stories this year.”
The finalists for this year were David Borofka’s My Life as a Mystic, Edward Porter’s The Changing Station, Nathan Oates’s The Moon Below, and Jill Logan’s No Home in This World Anymore.
Congratulations to all participants and thank you for creating compelling short fiction. The winning book from last year’s competition, Bad Kansas by Becky Mandelbaum, will be published in September 2017.
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