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Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Short Story

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 27, 2026
Entity authorityQ116742054 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Short Story, established in 1951, is an annual American literary award, presented alongside other Edgar Awards.

The award is presented to stories between 1,000 and 22,000 words that have been published in a magazine, periodical, e-zine, or book-length anthology. Stories shorter than 1,000 words (i.e., mini- or flash fiction) or longer than 22,000 words are ineligible. Although the Edgar Awards do not have a flash fiction category, works considered too long for the Short Story Award may be eligible for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel, Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel, or Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Paperback Original.

The Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Short Story winners are listed below.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Short Story” as open-knowledge reference entry. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Edgar, Allan and Award.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1951—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Edgar, Allan and Award providing the first useful test.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q116742054. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1951.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Short Story” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.