GAMBIER, OHIO—Two short stories published last year in The Kenyon Review have been awarded the prestigious O. Henry Prize—Gail Jones's " Desolation" and Ron Rash's "Speckle Trout." Only twenty stories are selected for the prize each year, out of hundreds submitted by magazine editors throughout North America.

Both of KR's winning stories came from authors new to the Review. "Desolation" originally appeared in the Winter 2003 issue of KR. Jones, who works at the University of Western Australia, is the author of two short story collections, The House of Breathing (1992) and Fetish Lives (1997), both published in the United States by George Braziller. Jones also published her first novel, Black Mirror, with Picador Australia.

Rash's "Speckle Trout" was published in the Spring 2003 issue. His first novel, One Foot in Eden, was published by Novello Festival Press. Rash holds the John and Dorothy Parris Distinguished Professorship in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University, a position he has held since 2003. He has a collection of stories, Casualties, and poems, Raising the Dead.

These recent prizes bring KR's total O. Henry Prize selections to 35, securing the magazine's spot on the O. Henry's "notable magazines" list, alongside heavy-hitting commercial publications, such as The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly. KR's first O. Henry Prize was in 1944 for Marguerite Young's story "Old James."

The prize is named in honor of William Sidney Porter, who adopted the pseudonym of O. Henry. A fiction writer with an illustrious life, O. Henry penned many of his stories in prison. When he was released from prison, he was invited to New York where he continued to write for the next eight years until his death in 1910. According to the O. Henry web site:

"Eight years after O. Henry's death, in April 1918, the Twilight Club (founded in 1883 and later known as the Society of Arts and Letters) held a dinner in his honor at the Hotel McAlpin in New York City. His friends remembered him so enthusiastically that a committee met at the Hotel Biltmore in December 1918 to establish an O. Henry memorial. The committee decided to award prizes in his name for short-story writers... In the words of Blanche Colton Williams (1879-1944), the first of the nine series editors, the memorial intended to 'strengthen the art of the short story and to stimulate younger authors.'"

Among those winning the O. Henry Prize are such influential writers as: Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Thurber, James Baldwin, Woody Allen, Mary McCarthy, Alice Walker, Chaim Potok, J. D. Salinger, Peter Taylor, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, E. L. Doctorow, Andrea Barrett, A. S. Byatt, Pam Houston, John Irving, and Stephen King.

The latest collection, titled The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005, is forthcoming in January 2005 from Anchor Books. Laura Furman, an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, is the series editor.