Winner of 2020 Algren Awards announced

Edward Hamlin has won the 2020 Algren Awards contest with his story “Haddad: A Requiem.” Hamlin was a finalist in the 2013 Algren contest. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, now but was a longtime Chicago-area resident. His winning story is about a professor who is struggling at the end of his life to deal with both personal and cultural losses. This year’s competition was presented by the Chicago Tribune and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. Begun in 1981, the contest honors Chicago literary great Nelson Algren by highlighting outstanding new short stories. Finalists each receive $750, and their stories will be published on the Chicago Tribune’s literary page. Their names and stories: Nick Arvin, “The Overmind”; Omer Friedlander, “Alte Sachen”; Lillian Li, “Maintenance”; Becky Mandelbaum, “Winner Winner”; and Victor Yang, “My Son.” This year’s contest had 2,300 entries, which were pared to the winning stories through a judging process of four rounds. The judges for the final round were Namwali Serpell, who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of “The Old Drift”; Salvatore Scibona, director of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, whose latest novel is “The Volunteer”; and Weike Wang, author of “Chemistry,” which won the 2018 PEN-Hemingway Award. My role is contest administrator. The winning Algren stories will be published at www.chicagotribune.com/ books.