Joy Williams has won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. The $5,000 prize, given in honor of the late Bernard Malamud, was announced Wednesday morning by the directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation in Washington.

Richard Ford, one of this year’s judges, said, “Joy Williams’s short stories are, sentence to sentence, incandescent, witty, alarming, often hilarious while affecting seeming inadvertence (but not really) in their powerful access to our human condition. She is a stirring writer and has long been deserving of the Malamud Award.”

Williams’s most recent collection is “The Visiting Privilege,” published last fall. In her review in The Washington Post, Lisa Zeidner wrote, “She has often been anointed as the literary heir to Anton Chekhov and Flannery O’Connor, but Williams’s voice is most emphatically her own. Her stories begin realistically enough, then permute into hallucinatory fairy tales, as grim as anything in Grimm, but also grimly funny.”

Williams, who lives in Tucson and Laramie, Wy., is the author of four story collections, four novels and two works of nonfiction. In 1999, she won the Rea Award for the Short Story.

Williams will accept the PEN/Malamud Award at a reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington on Dec. 2.