Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction
The Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction, established to honor Liza Nelligan, is now in its ninth year. Featured in the Colorado Review‘s Fall/Winter issue, winner Matthew Shaer’s story “Ghost” was select by the final judge Jane Hamilton. Here is what she has to say about the story:
“This story is tightly packed—it has a great deal of the characters’ history and their private and shared suffering in just eighteen pages—and yet the narrative richness is beautifully contained within the boundaries of the story form. There are so many capably written stories—a lot of writers have the hang of it—but when you come across a story that is nearly as distilled as a poem, where all the parts work together, where the language is precise and lyrical, and when the story has ‘an intense awareness of human loneliness,’ the quality that Frank O’Connor believes defines the short story—you’re likely to say, Here it is. The real thing. As I did with ‘Ghosts.'”
This issue also contains writing from Judith Adkins, Peter Balakian, Eric Baus, Hadara Bar-Nadav, Bill Capossere, Maxine Chernoff, Endi Bogue Hartigan, Elise Juska, Erin Kasdin, Alex Lemon, Edward Porter, Tomaž Šalamun, and John Yau.
