The eight must-sees of Cork Short Story festival
A host of Irish and international writers will read on Leeside, writes
Cork-born writers Frank O’Connor and William Trevor were both masters of the art of the short story, attracting acclaim at home and abroad for their sharply observed portraits of parochial Ireland.
William Trevor: Writer in Profile was originally screened on RTÉ in 1976, while Frank O’Connor: Writers of Today offers a rare opportunity to see the author discuss his writing practice, in conversation with US literary critic Walter Kerr in the 1950s.
Nayrouz Qarmout is a Palestinian journalist, author and women’s rights campaigner whose prize-winningcollection of stories, The Sea Cloak and Other Stories, has just been translated from Arabic into English.
Drawing from her own experiences growing up in a refugee camp in Damascus, as well as her current life in Gaza, the stories provide a valuable insight into what it means to be a woman in Palestine today.
Southword Editions, the publishing branch of the Munster Literature Centre, is launching its first fiction chapbooks from its inaugural Southword Fiction Chapbook Competition at this year’s festival.
The winners are It’s Not Me, It’s You by Brian Kirk (Best Irish Entry) and A Middle Eastern No by Jill Widner (Best International Entry).
Kirk and Widnerwill both read from their chapbooks at this event.
It has been quite a year for Cork author Danielle McLaughlin, who recently added the £30,000 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award to the $165,000 Windham-Campbell prize for fiction, which she won in March.
She will be joined by Claire Adam, whose debut novel Golden Child won this year’s Desmond Elliot Prize.
London-based writer Adam was born in Trinidad and Tobago and her mother is from Cork.
This new event pays tribute to the art of short short stories, and gives six writers who have yet to publish a collection of short fiction an opportunity to give a reading in a professional setting.
The featured writers, Ashling Dennehy, Conor Duggan, Marie Gethins, Eleanor Hooker, Paul Lenehan, Davena O’Neill, were allselected from an open call.
Cónal Creedon’s work encompasses short stories, novels, plays, and documentary films.
While Lisa McInerney is perhaps best known for her novels The Glorious Heresies and The Blood Miracles, part of an ongoing trilogy, she is also an accomplished short story writer, with her story Navigation long listed for the 2017 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.
One thing both writers have in common is that much of their work is steeped in the milieu and vernacular of Cork and this is sure to be an enlightening and entertaining discussion, shepherded by Tadhg Coakley, author of The First Sunday in September.
The Irish literary scene is bursting with emerging talent, and two of the brightest stars are Nicole Flattery and Lucy Sweeney Byrne.
Flattery’s debut collection Show Them a Good Time attracted rave reviews, while Sweeney Byrne’s recently released collection, Paris Syndrome, is the first publication from Banshee Press, an offshoot of the literary journal.
Once the ‘next big thing’ himself, Kevin Barry is now firmly ensconced as one of Ireland’s foremost contemporary writers and purveyor par excellence of the short story.
His work has been garlanded with prizes galore, and his latest book Night Boat to Tangier was long-listed for the Booker Prize.
Here he is joined by Wexford author Peter Murphy,author of two novels, John the Revelator (2009) and Shall We Gather at the River (2013).
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