Big names up for €50,000 literature prize

SOME of the biggest names in literature are competing for the inaugural €50,000 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize, it emerged yesterday.

Irish writer William Trevor, Chinese Nobel Prize winner Gao Xing Jian, Annie Proulx, author of The Shipping News, and Joanne Harris, whose book Chocolat was made into a film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp, are just some of the writers competing.

The prize, which is the biggest short story prize in the world, has also attracted entries from writers William Boyd (Armadillo and Any Human Heart), Tim Winton (whose The Riders and Dirt Music were shortlisted for the Booker Prize), and Alice Hoffman, whose book Practical Magic was filmed with Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock.