Nathan Englander Wins Short Story Prize
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.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO