Winner of the 2002 Rea Award for the Short Story Announced

Mavis Gallant

On April 17, the annual $30,000 Rea Award for the Short Story was awarded to Mavis Gallant. The Rea Award is the only award in the U.S. exclusively for the short story and is awarded not for a single work, but for "literary power, originality, and influence on the genre." This year’s jurors were writers Deborah Eisenberg, Alice Munro, and Joy Williams. In selecting this year’s winner, they cited that Gallant has "shown us over and over again what a marvel a short story can be…. She is a fearless writer, apparently equal to representing on paper any aspect of mind or time, however subtle, intractable, or evanescent."

Gallant, the author of more than 100 short stories, was born in Montreal in 1922. In 1950, she left her job as a reporter for the Montreal Standard and moved to Paris, where she began writing fiction. Her first story was published in 1951. Most of Gallant’s stories first appeared in The New Yorker, where she continues to publish.

In 1981, Gallant received the Governor General’s award for literature for her collection of stories, Home Truths (Dell Publishing Co.). The same year, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, and in 1993, she was raised to Companion, the Order’s highest level. She’s also the author of two novels, Green Water, Green Sky (Bloomsbury), and A Fairly Good Time.

Michael M. Rea was a collector of first editions of American short stories and served as a Trustee of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He established the Rea Award for the Short Story in 1986 to honor a living U.S. or Canadian writer who has "made a significant contribution to the short story form." The Rea Award is administered by the Dungannon Foundation, which was established by Rea and named for his paternal hometown in Northern Ireland. Previous Rea Award winners include Alice Munro (2001), Andre Dubus (1996), and Joyce Carol Oates (1990).