American writer Anthony Doerr wins the £30,000 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award 2011

American writer Anthony Doerr has won the world’s most valuable short story prize for his story, The Deep.

Described by judge Melvyn Bragg as ‘an outstanding work of fiction. It utterly captivated me from the first reading’ The Deep is set in Detroit in the early 20th century.

This is the second time in as many months that Doerr has been awarded a prize for fiction. He recently won The Story Prize in the USA, for Memory Wall, his second collection of short stories. Granta magazine named Doerr one of its 21 Best of Young American Novelists.

Anthony Doerr was chosen from a shortlist of six writers including a former City para-legal and new literary voice Roshi Fernando, prolific short story writer Yiyun Li, former journalist Will Cohu, who was shortlisted for this prize last year, Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Hilary Mantel, and Man Booker Prize 2004 shortlisted author Gerard Woodward.

The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, launched last year, is an annual literary prize which builds on the success of an innovative short-fiction slot in The Sunday Times Magazine introduced by the deputy editor, Cathy Galvin.

The judges are author and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, journalist and author Daisy Waugh, writer and journalist Will Self, Booker Prize-winning novelist and poet AS Byatt, and Andrew Holgate, literary editor of The Sunday Times. The non-voting chair of Judges is Matthew Evans, chairman of EFG Private Bank and former chairman of Faber & Faber.

Judge Melvyn Bragg comments:
“Doerr’s prose is remarkably convincing. It conveys a sense of time and place in Detroit, in the Depression, with the wreckage of heavy industry, the wastage of men and the urban blight.
‘In such a short space Doerr creates finely shaped and developed characters. Tom is the hero - the word is justified here – because he gets a life sentence when he is only four years old when the doctor diagnoses a ‘hole in the heart....Lifespan of sixteen. Eighteen if he’s lucky.’
‘Doerr describes very finely and quietly the way Tom lives with it and because of it. I’ve read this story many times and still find it profoundly moving.”

The winner was announced overnight (Friday, April 8) at an awards dinner at The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. The shortlisted writers will each receive a cheque for £500.

The Deep by Anthony Doerr will be published in The Sunday Times Magazine and online at www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/shortstory on Sunday, April 10.