Photograph of Renny Gong by riel Sturchio; photograph of Bud Smith by Jonathan Aprea.
We are thrilled to announce that Renny Gong will receive this year’s George Plimpton Prize and that Bud Smith will receive the Susannah Hunnewell Prize. The awards will be presented at our annual Spring Revel on April 14 in New York, MCed by John Early and Wallace Shawn. We’ll also be honoring Edward P. Jones with the Hadada, our award for lifetime achievement in literature.
The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993, honors our founding editor’s commitment to championing new talent by recognizing an emerging fiction writer of exceptional merit published in the magazine during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Amie Barrodale, Emma Cline, Isabella Hammad, Yiyun Li, Ottessa Moshfegh, and David Szalay.
Of this year’s Plimpton Prize–winning story, the Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson, writes:
“You’re not dumb, okay,” the twelve-year-old narrator of Renny Gong’s “Ping-Pong Kids” says to his Chinese-born mother by way of apology, having implied that she enjoys phone games for people with “low intelligence” and should read more instead. The mother and son are en route to an intensive table tennis training camp in Qingdao, where coaches take whipping sticks to trainees’ shins and ping-pong prodigies are manufactured by the dozen. Gong has coined a new declension of the stage mom: a beautiful, driven single immigrant, pushing her child to realize the ambition that shapes both of their lives. In fresh, vernacular prose, he conjures the cruelty and failures of children impelled to exceed their parents as deftly as he renders the technical details of the sport they play. The story limns the distinctions between “ping-pong” and “table tennis,” friendship and rivalry, finally exploring the emergence of the boy’s own values alongside the intrinsic pleasures of just plain fun.
Established in 2023, the Susannah Hunnewell Prize recognizes an outstanding piece of prose or poetry published by the Review in the previous year, and is given in memory of the magazine’s beloved former publisher, who died in 2019. Hunnewell first joined the Review as an intern during George Plimpton’s editorship, and later served as Paris editor before taking on the role of publisher. Among her contributions to the magazine are some of the finest interviews in the Writers at Work series, including conversations with Emmanuel Carrère, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The prize has previously been awarded to Ishion Hutchinson, Caleb Crain, and Julien Columeau and Sana R. Chaudhry.
“Skyhawks” is Bud Smith’s second story in the Review; his first, “Violets,” was published in issue no. 233 (Summer 2020) and was featured in The Paris Review Podcast Season 3, Episode 5. His next novel, Mighty, is forthcoming from Knopf. Of “Skyhawks,” which is set on a New Jersey oil refinery, Simpson writes:
As first lines go, this one has it all: “The refinery has been in continuous operation since 1909, a year after Henry Ford put all the horses out of business.” In twenty-one pages, “Skyhawks” accomplishes multiple feats of technical bravado and renders vivid at least half a dozen characters—and that’s not counting a crew of Polish painters, who, according to refinery history, once painted their hangar in wild colors, planted sunflowers, and brought with them the cats whose descendants now roam the grounds. Smith’s narrator is never preachy or overtly moralizing, even as he chronicles the uneasy relation between the business of the refinery and the surrounding natural landscape of twelve hundred acres, on which there was once a farm: “Butterflies seem possible. Every once in a while, a confused seagull will make a nest on a high-up platform. When we climb the ladder, we get dive-bombed. They think we’re there to kill their egglings. No, we’re just trying to gently service the machines that are efficiently destroying the entire world.” This story is also very, very funny.
The prizewinners were selected by the editorial committee of the Review’s board of directors: Kwame Anthony Appiah, William Beekman, Jeffrey Eugenides, Stephen Gaghan, Heather Ive, Radhika Jones, Jeanne McCulloch, Mona Simpson, Ileene Smith, and Antonio Weiss.
Tickets are still available for the Spring Revel—a night to celebrate the extraordinary writing and art that the Review has published over the last year, and to raise essential funds for the magazine’s future in the company of its contributing writers and artists. We look forward to raising a glass to Jones, Gong, and Smith, and we hope you’ll join us.