Amy Hempel Receives Short Story Writer’s Honor

11/4/2008

Noted author Amy Hempel, a recipient of the Hobson Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship who replaced Michael Cunningham as coordinator of the M.F.A. Program in Fiction at Brooklyn College this fall, has been awarded yet another literary honor.

Hempel was selected as the winner of the 2008 Rea Award for the Short Story, an annual $30,000 prize that is presented to a writer from the United States or Canada for "significant contribution to the discipline of the short story form." Her work, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, was published in 2006 by Scribner and was named one of the Ten Best Books of that year by The New York Times.

"I’m very happy to have won the Rea Award," Hempel said. "It’s an honor."

According to this year’s jurors, Hempel’s work compares with that of Anton Chekov. They said she "is one of our masters of dire emotional state rendered with an off-handedness that, combined with tenderness, results in fiction that’s at once dispassionate and compassionate."

Past winners of the Rea Award, which was launched in 1986, include Cynthia Ozick, Tobias Wolff, Eudora Welty, and John Updike. The award was established by Elizabeth Richebourg Rea, in honor of her late husband Michael A. Rea. Ms. Rea is the director of the Dungannon Foundation, which sponsors the award.