The award was endowed by James A. Michener, who donated the Canadian royalty earnings from his 1988 novel Journey.
The prize's winner in 2000, Timothy Taylor, was the first writer ever to have three stories nominated for the award in the same year.
[2] The Journey Prize also publishes an annual anthology of the year's longlisted short stories.
Two writers, Andrew MacDonald and David Bergen, have both had a record four total stories selected for inclusion in the annual anthology.
In 2020, the Journey Prize committee announced that the upcoming award would be a special edition devoted exclusively to Black Canadian writers, considering stories published in multiple years.