The prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction is given annually to two outstanding collections of short fiction. Winners each receive $1,000, and their collections are published by the University of Georgia Press. The first award-winning collections were published in 1983. Remarkably, all of the books are still in print, which offers impressive evidence of the contest's determination to "encourage gifted emerging writers by bringing their work to national attention."

The award was named after Georgia writer Flannery O'Connor (1925 - 1964), who is best known for her short stories, like "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "Good Country People."

Who Are the Judges?

The four (or sometimes five) preliminary judges vary each year, but they are usually accomplished writers, including past recipients of the Flannery O'Connor Award. Each judge reads approximately one quarter of the manuscripts and chooses seven to ten favorites to forward to the series editor, Nancy Zafris, who makes the final decision.

Zafris was herself a winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award in 1990. In addition to short stories, she has written novels, screenplays, and poems.

Where Are They Now?

More than 60 writers have received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, and you can find a complete list of winners on the University of Georgia Press website.

The award describes itself, in part, as a "proving ground for new writers," and several past winners -- like Ha Jin, Antonya Nelson, Molly Giles, and Gina Oschner -- are names you might very well recognize.

But admittedly, most of the names on the list are unfamiliar -- or only vaguely familiar -- to me. So I started wondering who they were, what exactly they had proven on this "proving ground," and where the award had led them.

Some of the winners have published an astonishing number of stories in fine journals and have racked up impressive awards for their writing. But even those without a jaw-dropping resume seem to have maintained a rich writing life. Past winners include novelists, memoirists, journalists, book reviewers, writers of creative nonfiction, biographers, screenwriters, and at least one comic book writer. And most of them, of course, write in more than one form.

Though many of us got excited when Alice Munro -- who writes short stories almost exclusively -- won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, reviewing the Flannery O'Connor Award winners suggests that few writers can or want to specialize solely in that form.

So investigating the past winners has made me appreciate the award more than ever. The winners are, of course, indispensable -- they wrote the original stories, and they continue to write short stories alongside many other genres. But the award is dedicated to preserving the "vitality of the genre" of short fiction exclusively. With the possible exception of Alice Munro, that vitality seems to reside less in any individual writer than in an institution that has made a specific, lasting commitment to it.

So … What Should You Read?

The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction is one of the most respected short story awards out there. And because the winners are all still in print, choosing where to begin can be daunting.

You could always start with the most recent winners, but another option would be to try a sampler. To celebrate the 30^th anniversary of the award, the University of Georgia Press put together a best-of anthology called Stories from the Flannery O'Connor Award: A 30th Anniversary Anthology.

The anthology consists of two volumes, which are available only as e-books. The Early Years, edited by Charles East, the original series editor, includes stories from 1983 to 1997. The Recent Years, edited by Nancy Zafris, includes stories from 1998 to 2012.

And once you've read the anthologies -- remember how wonderful it is to have all those collections still in print? -- you can choose which authors you'd like to pursue in greater depth.