High-profile entries for short story award

COMPETITION is intensifying for the world’s largest short story award.

The list of candidates for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award was yesterday whittled down to 30, with Irish and international authors featuring prominently.

The award, in association with the Munster Literature Centre (MLC) in Cork, nets the winner 35,000 and was first awarded as part of last year’s European Capital of Culture celebrations.

Among the 30 finalists are Irish author William Wall, Booker Prize nominee Bernard MacLaverty, playwright and novelist Adam Thorpe, British-based writer Helen Simpson, 2003 Orange prize winner Valerie Martin and Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami.

A high-profile panel of judges will select a winner in time for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival in September.

The panel, chaired by Cork-based writer Tom McCarthy, includes Silke Scheuermann, one of Germany’s most significant contemporary poets and fiction authors.

Patrick Cotter of the MLC said the award has gained huge international recognition despite only being in its sophomore year.

The full list is: In Strange Gardens & Other Stories by Peter Stamm;The Darkness of Wallis Simpson by Rose Tremain; To The World of Men Welcome by Nuala Ní Chonchúir, The Good Works of Ayela Linde by Charlotte Forbes; The Unfinished Novel & Other Stories by Valerie Martin; I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train by Peter Hobbs; A Life Elsewhere by Segun Afolabi; Notes from A Turkish Whorehouse by Philip Ó Ceallaigh; Gallatin Canyon by Thomas McGuane; Constitutional by Helen Simpson; Joyce’s Pupil by Drago Janávar; Matters of Life & Death by Bernard MacLaverty (Irl); Is This the Way You Said by Adam Thorpe; The Magician’s Beautiful Assistant & Other Stories by Rachel Wyatt; The First Hurt by Rachel Sherman; Drowning in Gruel by George Singleton; Year of Fire by David H Lynn; Touchy Subjects by Emma Donoghue; Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg;

Untold Stories by Alan Bennett; No Paradiso by William Wall; Kafka in Bronteland & other Stories by Tamar Yellin; Invisible Islands by Angus Peter Campbell; Blind

Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami; The Young Apollo and Other Stories by Louis Auchincloss; The Royal Ghosts by Samrat Upadhyay; Between Here and the Yellow Sea by Nic Pizzolatto; The Unsettling by Peter Rock; Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead by Alan DeNiro.