Love for her mother expressed in a new award

A new literary award, sponsored by a Cork-born former senior executive at Apple in the US, is worth €3,000 and is open to writers of both fiction and non-fiction.

California-based Christine O’Sullivan is financing the K Award in honour of her late mother, Kathleen Furlong. O’Sullivan, who retired from Apple five years ago to raise her two children and run a vineyard in Napa Valley, says she always wanted to commemorate her mother "who touched many lives in a low key way".

Furlong, who died 13 years ago from cancer, was brought up in Greenmount Crescent in Cork. One of nine children, she came from a household of meagre means. Furlong’s father was in the army and her mother was a housewife.