Winners

2004 Winner

Third Annual Award
Long for This World (Houghton Mifflin)
By Michael Byers

"Altruism allies with greed in this novel set in Seattle, Washington . . . Henry Moss, a medical researcher, discovers a genetic anomaly that promises a treatment for a rare syndrome and implies a major breakthrough in the study of the aging process . . . [S]olid plotting, lovingly developed characters, and thoughtful exploration of social and cultural issues" (Booklist).

Michael Byers received his MFA from the University of Michigan and was a Stegner fellow at Stanford University. His story collection, The Coast of Good Intentions (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the Academy of American Arts and Letters. Byers was also the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Writer's Award and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award, and his stories have been selected for The Best American Short Stories, 1997 and The O. Henry Awards: Prize Stories, 2010. Byers's second novel, Percival's Planet, was published in 2010 by Henry Holt.

Judges: Colleen Curran (author of Whores on the Hill), Harry Kollatz, Jr. (writer for Richmond Magazine), and Isabel Zuber (author of Salt and recipient of the 2003 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award)