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Stanford Report, March 11, 2009

Honors & Awards

Tobias Wolff

Tobias Wolff

TOBIAS WOLFF, the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor, has received the Story Prize for Our Story Begins, his most recent collection of short fiction. The $20,000 award, with an engraved silver bowl, is the largest first-prize amount of any annual U.S. book award for fiction.

Wolff is the author of three previous story collections, a novella, a novel and two memoirs. His honors include the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award (both for excellence in the short story), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

The judges said Wolff is “still at the top of his game” and cited his “increasingly severe insistence on the most telling and specific detail as the author creates entire worlds, entire life stories, out of eloquent molecules of narrative. The emotional impact of these lapidary stories is specific and powerful.”