American-Jewish author Nathan Englander has been awarded the 2012 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award for his short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.

Englander beat out authors Etgar Keret, Sarah Hall and Kevin Barry for the 25,000 euro prize, which is one of the biggest prizes granted for short story writing. Past winners include Edna O’Brien and Haruki Murakami.

In their decision, the judges called Englander’s story “powerful,” adding that they were impressed by his maturity and calling his stories “multilayered in meaning.” The title of the story that lends its title to the book is a reference to Raymond Carver’s 1981 short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

Nathan Englander was born in 1970 and grew up in New York in an Orthodox Jewish community. He studied at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and lived in Jerusalem for several years in the nineties until moving back to New York in 2001.

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