New York, N.Y. - The annual $30,000 Rea Award for the Short Story is awarded to AMY HEMPEL.

Michael M.Rea, a passionate reader and collector of short stories, founded The Rea Award for the Short Story in 1986 to be given annually to a living United States or Canadian writer whose work has made a “significant contribution to the discipline of the short story form”. The Rea Award is unique in that it is notgiven for lifetime achievement,a collection of stories or for a writer’s body of work but rather for originality and influence on the genre. Cynthia Ozick,the first winner of The Rea Award, said, “By now the Rea Award is an indispensable American institution and a coveted American prize. It is our little Nobel – little only in the sense that it addresses the short form.”Michael M.Rea died in the summer of 1996. Sponsored by the Dungannon Foundation, named after Rea’s Irish ancestors, The Rea Award continues under the direction of his widow, Elizabeth Richebourg Rea.

Three distinguished writers are appointed annually by Ms.Rea who each nominate two writers qualified to win the Award.These three jurors spend the summer reading short stories by the six nominees and meet in early Fall to determine the winner.This year’s jurors were Sheila Kohler, Margot Livesey and Jim Shepard. They have written the following citation:

Amy Hempel is one of our masters of the dire emotional state rendered with an off-handedness that, combined with tenderness,results in fiction that’s at once dispassionate and compassionate.She has been called manythings:our Chekhov,our Kleist,but surely,she is above all her own creation,a courageous writer whose wit and concentrated sentences capture our contemporary vulnerability,the fleeting moments of our joy and sorrow,our attempts to find reasons to live.