Twenty-thousand dollars is no longer enough to change anyone’s life, or even to finance a kitchen renovation, but in the modest world of fiction awards, it’s quite a rich jackpot.

Next Wednesday, the winner of the Story Prize, an upstart literary award for a published collection of short stories, will be awarded $20,000, along with an engraved silver bowl. That’s more than the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, or the PEN/Faulkner Award takes home.

The new prize was created by a New York-based philanthropist, Julie Lindsey, and an editor at Business Week, Larry Dark. Having edited the O. Henry Award from 1997 to 2002, Mr. Dark has come to be one of the nation’s very few mainstays in the world of story prizes. The other name that springs to mind is Katrina Kenison, editor of the “Best American Short Stories” series.

Over a noisy Japanese lunch, the 45-year-old editor explained why he thinks the short story deserves such a boost. Throughout the meal he was serious and focused, resisting all invitations to wander off-topic. His dry manner didn’t crack until the end of the meal, when he buckled and asked a photographer to shoot him with a local street performer called the Naked Cowboy. Still, he didn’t smile.

The Story Prize is for a book of short stories rather than a single tale. Sixty-one books were submitted for consideration, and the finalists chosen by Mr. Dark and Ms. Lindsey are Edwidge Danticat’s “The Dew Breaker,” Cathy Day’s “The Circus in Winter,” and Joan Silber’s “Ideas of Heaven.” The three books are being read by this year’s panel of judges: the executive editor of the Paris Review, Brigid Hughes; the author Dan Chaon, and a Chicago bookseller, Ann Christophersen. The panel will rotate every year, and Mr. Dark, reluctant to select a panel that consists entirely of writers, is dead set on finding a librarian next year. The winner will be announced at Symphony Space, in a ceremony that will be a part of the “Selected Shorts” program and will be taped for broadcast by NPR at a later date. “I wish it were live,” Mr. Dark said.

Mr. Dark views the award as a means of advocating the short story, which in major literary prizes is often dwarfed by novels. “We felt short-story collections don’t get the recognition they deserve,” Mr. Dark said. “They rarely win the awards. They’re rarely even finalists.”

In the past five years, only four of the 25 National Book Award finalists were collections of short stories. Similar proportions obtain for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Only three writers – Jhumpa Lahiri, John Updike, and Sabina Murray – went on to take an award home.

Ms. Lindsey and Mr. Dark thought it important that the award offer more money than the other major awards, which average around $10,000. “I read a newspaper article this summer where they had the top winners of the PGA golf tour and the guy who was ranked no. 400 was getting a couple-hundred thousand dollars a year,” Mr. Dark said.

When he edited the O. Henry Awards, choosing finalists and writing introductory essays for the annual book of winning stories, Mr. Dark had a staff working in conjunction with Anchor, so he worked alongside a troupe of publicists, marketing people, editorial assistants, and the like.They oversaw the logistics, and his task was to read all the fiction in hundreds of magazines and determine which 20 stories to select. With the Story Prize, he has no staff, and he’s overseeing everything from maintaining the Web site to answering all the organization’s phone calls – he carries the Story Prize’s “office,” a mobile telephone, in his pocket – to worrying about whether the tickets to the event will sell.

“I’m trying to get the word out,” he said. “When I checked before Christmas there were tickets for Row D center. Now it’s Row O.”

Mr. Dark grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia and came to the short story at an early age. He went to the University of Pennsylvania, then to Columbia University to get a master’s degree in creative writing. While still at school, on a project for Columbia’s literary magazine, he approached established writers and asked them for bits that had been excised from published work. An editor at Ballantine Books approached him and asked him to put together a book of literary outtakes. He was one of the few lucky students with book deals before graduation. Four anthologies later, he was approached to apply for the O. Henry stewardship. It wasn’t until 2002, when he was replaced, that he found himself without a project.

A year later his wife, the writer Alice Elliott Dark, addressing a group at Manhattanville College, met Ms. Lindsey. The short-story lover and philanthropist told Mrs. Dark that she was hoping to start a short-story award and wondered if Mr. Dark might be up to the task. He called her the next morning.

Ever since seeing Mr. Dark give a speech when he was the O. Henry Awards editor, Ms. Lindsey felt certain he was the right person to team up with for her new award. “He’s so competent and smart and low-key,” she said in a telephone interview. “I had been following his O. Henry essays for years and I was bowled over. They really spoke to me.”

Mr. Dark lives in Montclair, N.J., with his wife and their son. The couple changed their last names to “Dark” – his was Charny – when they married in 1988. “We thought it was a good name for writers,” Mr. Dark said. “There weren’t any other Darks in the phone book.” Mr. Dark, who started out as a writer, said he still has time to write fiction. “You can always get up an hour earlier or go to bed an hour later or not cut the grass,” he said.

When he was made editor of the O. Henry Awards, he increased the number of magazines that are considered from 110 to more than 250. He brought back an old O. Henry tradition, a panel of judges to choose the top three winners. And he started a Web library of all the winners dating back to 1919.

At the time, he was reading about 3,000 stories a year. How did he know when there was no point reading a story through to the end? “When a story is lousy you have a pretty good idea pretty fast,” he said. “There are things right away that will say, ‘There’s no way to get out of this hole.'”

As when “It was a dark and stormy night” is the opening line?

“I like ‘It was a dark and stormy night,'” he countered. “I think it’s a good beginning.”

As the Story Prize gains notice, Mr. Dark hopes it will influence the publishing industry to take on more short-story collections.

The short story’s golden age came in the early 20th century, when nearly every magazine relied on good fiction and writers could conceivably eke out a living writing stories. These days, women’s magazines have practically no short stories, and publishing houses often refuse to release a book of stories unless a novel by the same author has already proved successful. Meanwhile, the Zoo Press in Omaha announced last summer the cancellation of its annual Award for Short Fiction competition. And in September, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, based in Fairfax, Va., announced there would be no winner this year in its annual short-story contest as the judge found no manuscript worthy.

“I think we’ll have a small influence,” Mr. Dark said. “It will help editors to champion books. If an editor has a project get nominated, they might have an easier time the next time they’re fighting to take something on.”