5:01 p.m., Oct. 24, 2008----Viet Dinh, a supplemental faculty member in the University of Delaware's Department of English, can count himself in good company, as one of the best short story writers in North America. Dinh recently won an O. Henry Prize.

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O. Henry Prizes honor the 20 best contemporary short stories each year. Literary journal editors from the U.S. and Canada submit their issues to the selection committee, which chooses the winners from thousands of works. The prizes are widely regarded as the most prestigious award for short fiction.

Dinh says he's “thrilled” to be a recipient.

“So far it's the highlight of my writing career,” he says. His career is not without previous distinction. Earlier this year, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) awarded Dinh a $25,000 Literature Fellowship.

The O. Henry Prize committee chose Dinh's short story “Substitutes,” which chronicles a few months in the life of a South Vietnamese middle schooler. It begins in the fall of 1974, as the North Vietnamese established re-education camps in South Vietnam. The boy in the story narrates as his teacher disappears and is replaced by another. As time goes on, the pattern repeats, each teacher more disheveled than the last, until school is permanently closed and transformed into a prison camp.

Dinh describes “Substitutes” as “ruminative and nostalgic for something that was lost even if the people don't realize at the time what was lost.”

“Substitutes” will be included in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2009 anthology, set for publication by Random House Books in March.

“When you finish any sort of work you always feel that's the pinnacle of your achievement so far and sometimes that's true and sometimes it is not,” Dinh says. “It's always better to have that sense verified for you by some external force.”

Dinh teaches freshman composition at UD. He earned bachelor's degrees in creative writing and biology at Johns Hopkins University and a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of Houston.

Born in Vietnam and raised in Colorado, Dinh now resides in Wilmington, Del. He recently had works published in two literary journals, The Greensboro Review and the Crab Orchard Review. And, he is working on a novel.

His NEA endowment funded a month-long research trip to India, spent mostly in the northwestern state of Gujarat. There, he spent his days researching disaster aid relief.

Article by Andrea Boyle
Photo by Duane Perry