The PEN/Faulkner Foundation announces that Ted Chiang has been selected as the winner of the 2024 PEN/Bernard and Ann Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Given since 1988 in honor of the late Bernard Malamud, the award recognizes writers who have demonstrated exceptional achievement in the short story form.
“Ted Chiang’s stories are an absolute wonder to behold,” said PEN/Malamud Award Committee Chair Jung Yun. “Not only do they demonstrate his exceptionally high standards for creativity and construction, they also invite readers to think, imagine, and explore unique worlds beyond their own. Whether set in an alternate version of the past, or one possible version of the future, his work prompts important questions that are deeply relevant to how we live today. In doing so, Chiang exemplifies Bernard Malamud’s belief that a short story can produce ‘the surprise and effect of a profound knowledge in a short time.’”
Ted Chiang’s fiction has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and six Locus Awards, and it has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories. His first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, has been translated into twenty-one languages, and the title story was the basis for the Oscar-nominated film Arrival. His second collection, Exhalation, was chosen by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2019.
“I cannot overstate how surprised and delighted I am to be a recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story,” Chiang said. “The short story has played a central role in the history of science fiction; I grew up reading anthologies where every story contained a different world, and I feel privileged to be a part of science fiction’s growing acceptance in the wider literary world. As a writer I appreciate the way the short story allows me to focus on a single idea or moment, and it’s wonderful to receive an award that celebrates the form.”
Last year’s winner was Edwidge Danticat. Recent winners include Yiyun Li, Charles Baxter, Lydia Davis, John Edgar Wideman, Amina Gautier, Joan Silber, Jhumpa Lahiri, Joy Williams, and Deborah Eisenberg. A complete list of past winners is available at www.penfaulkner.org/our-awards/the-pen-malamud-award.
About the art of the short story, Bernard Malamud once said, “I like packing a self or two into a few pages, predicting lifetimes. The drama is terse, happens faster, and is often outlandish. A short story is a way of indicating the complexity of life in a few pages, producing the surprise and effect of a profound knowledge in a short time.”
Chiang will be honored at the annual PEN/Malamud Award Ceremony, held in partnership with American University, on Friday, December 6, 2024. Ticket information for the ceremony, which will be open to the public, will be available this fall.