THE RENOWNED AUTHOR Edna O’Brien has been named as the winner of this year’s Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award for her collection Saints and Sinners.
This is the first time an Irish writer has won the award, which was founded by the Munster Literature Centre in 2005 and offers the winner €35,000.
Judging this year’s award were Irish author Alannah Hopkin, music and book critic Chris Power, and poet and novelist Thomas McCarthy.
There were six collections on this year’s shortlist: Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li; Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod; Saints and Sinners by Edna O’Brien; Death is Not an Option by Suzanne Rivecca; The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín; and Marry or Burn by Valerie Trueblood.
This international short story award was set up in the memory of Cork literary legend Frank O’Connor, and is the single biggest prize in the world for a collection of short stories.
O’Brien told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland radio programme this morning that winning the award was “mega important” as “every writer wants to be read and to be heard.”
She said she puts as much “very, very hard work” into her short stories as she puts into her novels.
Her debut novel, The Country Girls, was banned when it was first released in Ireland in 1960.
O’Brien told Morning Ireland that she writes about “tense and terse situations and about the feelings of men and woman” and that Ireland is her “matrix”, no matter where she is.
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