It’s Short Story Month and to celebrate the short story form we’ve chosen 5 of our Favorite Modern Short Story Authors to Read. Enjoy!
5 Modern Short Story Authors to Read this Short Story Month
George Saunders
George Saunders is the author of nine books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize, and the story collections Pastoralia and Tenth of December.
His most recent book is another masterful short story collection Liberation Day that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose—wickedly funny, unsentimental, and exquisitely tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and surprise.
Claire Keegan
Her first story collection, “Antarctica,” released in 1999, won the Rooney prize for Irish literature and drew broad praise from critics. It took her nearly a decade to produce a second book of stories, Walk the Blue Fields,” which was met with similar acclaim.
Foster won the Davy Byrnes Award — the world’s richest prize for a short story. Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize.
Keegan’s crafts stories out of small details and insight, she has a lovely, easy flow of language, and a certain stony-eyed realism about human experience.
Yoko Ogawa
Yoko Ogawa has won every major Japanese literary award, including the Yomiuri Prize for The Housekeeper and the Professor and the Akutagawa Prize in 1990.
Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, A Public Space and Zoetrope. Her works translated into English include The Diving Pool, a collection of three novellas, The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris and Revenge.
She writes in haunting, spare, shimmering prose punctuated by acts of casual violence and vindictive spite. Profoundly unsettling, magnificently written and instantly memorable, her stories vindicate status as one of Japan’s greatest living authors. Ogawa is such a gifted writer, not a word is wasted, yet each resonates with a blend of poetry and tension.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.
Her debut collection of short-stories, Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Unaccustomed Earth won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, while her second novel, The Lowland was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. In 2012, Lahiri moved to Rome, Italy and has since began writing in Italian, first with the 2018 novel Dove mi trovo, then with her 2023 collection Roman Stories.
Lahiri’s writes with gorgeous, effortless prose; the characters haunted by regret, isolation, loss, and tragedies big and small; and most of all, a quiet, emerging sense of humanity.
Kevin Barry
Kevin Barry is the author of the short story collections Dark Lies The Island and There Are Little Kingdoms He has won the Authors Club Best First Novel Award, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.
His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Granta Book of the Irish Story, and many other journals. He also works on plays and screenplays and he lives in County Sligo. It is the short story format where he really shines, wickedly funny and hugely original.
If you enjoyed 5 Modern Short Story Authors to Read this Short Story Month, check out our profile of the wonderful Yoko Ogawa
