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MAVIS GALLANT IS
WINNER OF THE 2002 REA AWARD FOR THE SHORT STORY
 The
annual $30,000 Rea Award for the Short Story is awarded to Mavis Gallant.
The only
award in the U.S. exclusively for the short story, the Rea Award is
given not for one specific work, but rather for literary power, originality
and influence on the genre. Writers are nominated confidentially and
the winner is selected by a jury. This year's jurors are writers Deborah
Eisenberg, Alice Munro, and Joy Williams. In selecting this year's winner
the jurors offer the following citation about Gallant's work:
"Mavis
Gallant has shown us over and over again what a marvel a short story
can be. You can start to read any one of her stories (it does not matter
if it is one you have read ten times before) and you are at once swept
away-captivated, amazed, moved-by the grace of her sentences, the ease
of her wit, the suppleness of her narrative, the complexity and originality
of her perfectly convincing characters. She is a fearless writer, apparently
equal to representing on paper any aspect of mind or time, however subtle,
intractable, or evanescent. And the great gift bestowed is that such
skill seems less like skill than like magic --- it never makes you stop
to admire it, but simply allows you to be carried into the depths of
the story, and granted the piercing, powerful, live pleasure, the thrill
of capture, which is what we are always hoping for when we take up a
work of fiction."
Described
by the New York Times as having "radically reshaped the short story
decade after decade," Gallant has contributed to the short story
genre for over half a century. "Her characters do not flee from
home; they start out homeless, spending their lives conniving at accommodation
with a century that started in horror and is ending in hollowness...Gallant
primes us to expect them to be good or bad, but never hints which are
which; and in her stories tragedy can turn to comedy in a sentence...In
a real sense her style and attitude are her message."
Mavis Gallant,
an only child, was born in Montreal in August 1922. Her father died
when she was young, her mother remarried and Gallant was, in her own
words, "set afloat," attending a series of 17 public, convent,
and boarding schools.
In 1944,
she became a reporter for the Montreal Standard where she remained for
six years. During that time, at age 20, she married John Gallant, but
they divorced after five years. In 1950, she left her job at the newspaper
to pursue fiction writing. She chose Paris as her home base, but has
always remained a Canadian citizen. "I have arranged matters so
that I would be free to write," she once told an interviewer. In
another
recent interview, she noted, "I came back regularly to Montreal,
except in the period of 1950 to 1955, when I didn't have any money."
Gallant
achieved her ambition quickly - since 1951, she has published more than
100 stories, most of which first appeared in The New Yorker, where she
continues to publish.Her stories are collected, along with several novellas,
in:
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