Using Awards Lists As a RA Tool: The 2025 O'Henry Prize Winners

This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool.  

Each year, The O'Henry Prize Winners 

The O'Henry Prize has been given out since 1919. From the landing page for the annual book printed with the nominated stories:

The O. Henry Prize is the oldest major prize for short fiction in America. Awarded annually since 1919 (with a break in 2020), the prize seeks to provide a prominent platform for short story writers from all around the world and at all points in their careers. The winners’ stories are collected and published annually by Anchor Books.

...The guest editor chooses the twenty O. Henry Prize winners from a large pool of stories passed to her by the series editor. Stories published in magazines and online are eligible for inclusion. Stories may be written in English or translated into English.

Those words are from the beginning and end of that page. Please click through for more information about this long standing and prestigious prize. It is a prize that both honors some of our best known fiction writers, but also, identifies up and comers-- and it has done this reliably for over 100 years.

For the last few years, Literary Hub has handled the announcement. Here is this year's official announcement with a commentary about the process and overall feel of this year's anthology from series editor, Jenny Minton Quigley.

The post is useful and informative because it not only gives you the full table of contents, with the authors, the story titles, and where they were published, but also Quigley has a commentary on the Guest Editor (who is always a person of note themselves), their work and the stories said Guest Editor gravitated to.

Take this year for example. The Guest Editor was Edward P. Jones, two time O'Henry Prize winner and author of one of my favorite books ever-- The Known World. Here are some of the comments from Quigley about Jones and the stories her chose from the Literary Hub announcement:

Last summer, as our guest editor was reading through a hefty box of stories to select his 2025 O. Henry Prize winners, The New York Times announced their list of the one hundred best books of the twenty-first century. Can you guess whose work was included among the best works of fiction by American writers in the 2000s? Of course, the answer is our guest editor Edward P. Jones, who appears on the list twice: first with his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Known World (2003), listed at number 4, and again with his story collection All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006) at number 70.

...Marveling at the ways writers make things up is on Edward P. Jones’s mind these days. Throughout this delightful year spent observing him at work selecting the 2025 O. Henry Prize winners, it’s been clear to me that his objective is to find the kinds of truth that only that “fiction-writer’s freedom” to invent, shape, communicate, and testify can yield. The stories he’s chosen are indeed triumphs of imagination that ring truer in our hearts and minds than any thin facsimiles of reality we’ve come to accept as substitutes for the real thing in an age saturated with cheap information.

All of this leads me to the ways this prize can be used to help readers at your library and as a resource for you.

First, that statement from Quigley is a great way for you to get a sense of the issues and trends in fiction. Short stories are where trends first show up as writers explore ideas that are itching at the front of their brains. Novels take years from start to finish, therefore, the best way to get a handle on the ideas and concerns of our fiction writers in as real of time as possible is through short stories. You want to understand where fiction is moving-- look to short stories (in lit fiction AND genre fiction). 

Second, the nominated titles are made into a book each year. You should buy this book every year and keep the last 5 years, but don't overdo it. You do not need more that that (and every 3 years is plenty). You are not a depository library.

Third this list and the book that has the stories, is full of authors are authors you and our patrons know and love. They will be drawn to the anthology already. And this year specifically, as Quigley notes above, Jones is an author that many readers discovered or rediscovered a new in 2024 as he was all over the NYT Best Books of the Century discussion last summer. Many people will be primed to not only look at what he picked, but ask for more from the authors in the book.

While leads to ...Fourth, it is also full of authors they don't know about yet, but may want to read more from. Yes, they may ask you for more form the voices that are new to them, but you should also be paying attention to the authors that appear on the O'Henry Prize list each year and look for more from them before you are asked by your readers. Do they have any books of their own, what other anthologies have they appeared in, etc. Use the announcement for collection development purposes.

Fifth, this is great chance to have a short story display. Highlight single author collections and anthologies of ALL GENRES. Maybe even include essay collections as well. You can market this displays with a sign that says: "Great Short Reads" or "Short on Time?" I like that second title better because it is a question and draws readers in.  And then just have the books. In person and make a list for your e-book and audio readers as well. 

And last but never least here on RA for All-- the backlist! You can look to the past few years of O'Henry prize winners and the announcement themselves to do numbers 1-5 as well. Here are the Literary Hub announcements from 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021.