Saturday, July 12, 2014

Debut collection wins Frank O'Connor Award


The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award has been given to Irish author Colin Barrett, for his debut collection Young Skins.

Sponsored by Cork City Council and The School of English at University College Cork, the €25,000 award is described as the most lucrative prize in the world for a collection of short stories. Previous winners include Haruki Murakami, Edna O'Brien and Ron Rash

The book was first published in Ireland by The Stinging Fly Press in 2013, and was published in the UK this year by Jonathan Cape. Grove Atlantic will publish in the US next year, while translations are also planned for the Netherlands and France.

Novelists Alison MacLeod and Manuel Gonzales, poet Matthew Sweeney and artistic director of the Munster Literature Centre Patrick Cotter judged the prize. MacLeod said: "How dare a debut writer be this good? Young Skins has all the hallmarks of an instant classic.  Barrett's prose is exquisite but never rarefied.  His characters - the damaged, the tender-hearted and the reckless - are driven by utterly human experiences of longing. His stories are a thump to the heart, a mainline surge to the core. His vision is sharp, his wit is sly, and the stories in this collection come alive with that ineffable thing - soul."
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