Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.

Past winners include Jim Shepard for Like You’d Understand, Anyway, Elizabeth Strout for Anything Is Possible, and Brandon Taylor for Filthy Animals. The Story Prize comes with a cash award of $20,000. Bliss Montage spans a very long period of my life, more than a decade.” A novel can take years to write, but in my experience, it can also take that long to complete a satisfactory short story. If Severance established Ma as a unique voice in contemporary literature, her luminous first story collection only confirms her ability to deliver social critique through a startling and entertaining combination of realist and speculative fiction. “I can’t totally explain why, but I still find this form to be extremely daunting and difficult. Bliss Montage is an inventive, unsettling, and rewarding read. “I learned how to be a fiction writer by writing short stories,” she said. Ma started her acceptance speech by joking, “Well, I’m glad I showed up,” to laughs from the audience. “Sit longer, and the comically outlandish stories in Bliss Montage reveal a thrumming rage and grief, the shocking truths we try to ignore.” “At first the absurdities reveal a familiar sense of disbelief and loss,” they wrote. They praised Ma’s collection as “at once absurd and insightful.” Writers Adam Dalva and Danielle Evans served with bookseller/podcaster Miwa Messer as judges for this year’s Story Prize. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus praised the book as “haunting and artful.” Bliss Montage is the follow-up to her debut book, the novel Severance, which won the Kirkus Prize for fiction and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Ma’s collection, published last September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is also a finalist for this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. She was one of three finalists for the prize, along with Morgan Talty for Night of the Living Rez and Andrea Barrett for Natural History.

The author was named the winner at a private event Wednesday evening. Ling Ma has won the Story Prize, given annually to an outstanding story collection, for her book Bliss Montage.

Bliss montage