Montreal writer Andrew Hood has captured the fourth annual Danuta Gleed Literary Award for his short story collection Pardon Our Monsters.

The $10,000 prize honours a Canadian writer for the best first collection of short fiction in the English language.

The winner was announced late Friday by the Writer's Union of Canada. The award was created by John Gleed in honour of his late wife, an Ottawa fiction writer who died in 1996 at age 50.

A review of Hood's book by Canada's literary trade paper Quill & Quire called his stories subversive with "mousetrap-like constructions" and praised the author for possessing "a sharp sense of irony and [being] refreshingly unafraid to treat his characters mercilessly."

Two runners-up, who get $500 each, were also named:

• Roberta Rees of Calgary for Long After Fathers.
• Valerie Stetson of Kelowna, B.C. for The Year I Got Impatient.

Previous winners have included Charlotte Gill for Ladykiller, David Bezmozgis for Natasha: And Other Stories and Jacqueline Baker for A Hard Witching & Other Stories.