The University of Georgia Press has proudly hosted the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction for thirty years and publishes the resulting winning manuscripts. The first prize-winning books, Evening Out by David Walton and From the Bottom Up by Leigh Allison Wilson, appeared in print in 1983 to critical acclaim. Today, over sixty collections have now appeared in the series—collections that consistently receive national praise and noteworthy media attention. The contest is a celebrated path to publication. Like other short fiction contests, it is an important proving ground for writers and a showcase for the talent and promise that have helped sustain interest in the short story form.
The award was established in 1981 by Paul Zimmer, then the director of the University of Georgia Press, and acquisitions editor Charles East, who became its first series editor. Zimmer and East wanted to encourage gifted emerging writers by bringing their work to a national readership. The Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction series continues to publish collections from both debut and previously published short fiction writers. It uses a blind review process to allow new voices the opportunity to be chosen.
Under the editorship of Flannery O’Connor Award winner Nancy Zafris for the last four years, the contest has continued to attract hundreds of submissions each year. Winners are selected from a consistently growing pool of manuscripts and come from across the nation. In the span of the award’s history, the list of winners includes such distinguished writers as Ha Jin, Antonya Nelson, Rita Ciresi, and Mary Hood. We’d like to think that the award series not only helps winners become established as published authors but also, by maintaining a commitment to publishing book-length collections, encourages writers to continue to create compelling short fiction.
In recent years the Press has made efforts to make all collections from the series available for purchase. As of this anniversary, paperback editions of most winners are obtainable either through booksellers and online retailers or directly from UGA Press. Many collections are also available in e-book editions.
This e-book, which includes stories from contest winners over the first fifteen years of the award, is complemented by an e-book anthology of the last fifteen years, Stories from the Flannery O’Connor Award: A 30th Anniversary Anthology: The Recent Years. We hope these anthologies help readers find their way to new favorites among the many worthy and engaging short fiction collections published in the thirty year span of the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award, and we hope they will also encourage attention to the amazing short fiction of winners yet to be chosen.