Behind the Scenes of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize

We welcome Ailsa Cox, fiction writer, critic, tutor of creative writing, and one of the coordinators of the Edge Hill Prize for the Short Story, giving us a quick peak behind the scenes of the Prize, whose winner will be announced on July 4th:

Just about to name the winner of the Edge Hill Prize for the Short Story and as usual my lips are sealed. I’m giving nothing away – not even a clue. I don’t want anything to spoil that moment of surprise and delight at the award ceremony. This year’s shortlist includes two Irish writers, a science fiction writer, two Booker nominees and a Booker prizewinner - in other words, Chris Beckett, Gerard Donovan, Anne Enright, Shena Mackay and Ali Smith. Five really strong contenders. I’m glad the decision isn’t up to me.

The prize was started in 2007 after I ran the first of several short story conferences at Edge Hill University. Many people don’t know where Edge Hill is, which is one of the reasons why the university was keen to put us on the map with a prestigious prize. It is in fact in Ormskirk, Lancashire, somewhere between Liverpool and Southport. By giving £5000 to the author of a published short story collection we were doing something unique; we have the National Short Story Prize and the international Frank O’Connor Award Munster Literature Centre Home for any collection published in English but there is nothing for writers in the UK and Ireland which is anything like, for instance, The Rea Award for the Short Story in the US. We hoped the prize would help change attitudes in the literary world, and actively encourage publishers to accept and promote collections, in the knowledge that they might get some recognition for it.

Since then the university has upped its contribution, so there is now a second prize and a Readers’ Choice; and Blackwell Bookshops have sponsored a specially commissioned artwork to go to the winner. This is not your average bit of engraving gathering dust at the back of the mantelpiece! I’ve been watching Pete Clarke, a painter with a special interest in using text and imagery, create something really special for this year. This year’s judges were last year’s winner, Claire Keegan, Mark Flinn, Pro-Vice Chancellor of the university and James Walton, the writer and critic. Waiting for their final decision was gruelling – I had no idea what would come out of their discussion and dreaded personality clashes or stalemate; and as the time ticked by I needn’t have worried. Though none of them really knew one another, they made a good team, open-minded and sensible and their decision was unanimous. The Readers’ Choice is decided by a combination of local groups from Get Into Reading The Reader - Outreach Programmes and students from our Creative Writing MA Creative Writing. Last year it was won by horror writer Christopher Fowler. What will happen this year? I told you, I’m not saying.

Five writers, three prizes (and theoretically the winner could also get the Readers’ Choice). Not to mention those writers who didn’t quite make the shortlist but have produced outstanding work. This, after all, is a prize for a collection, and sometimes the quality of an individual story isn’t sustained across the whole book. As a reader, I find this especially in small press publications. When a less well known writer does get onto the shortlist it’s so exciting, for them and for us. Last year Rob Shearman didn’t win anything; but even though Tiny Deaths went on to win a World Fantasy Award he says it all started for him with the Edge Hill Prize.


Thanks, Ailsa - we will announce the winner as soon as the news is made public! Good luck to all.

For more about the prize, visit the Edge Hill Short Story Prize page and Ailsa Cox's Edge Hill home page.

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2009 Frank O'Connor Award Shortlist Revealed

The Frank O'Connor Award shortlist has been revealed. At 35,000 euro, this is the biggest prize in the world for a short story collection, and previous winners include Haruki Murakami, Miranda July, Jhumpa Lahiri and Yiyun Li.

From this year's 57-strong longlist of collections, the three-judge panel picked the following six collections - passing over big names such as Ali Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Orange Prize winner Chimanda Ngozi Adiche, Mary Gaitskill and James Lasdun and Sana Krasikov.

An Elegy for Easterly
by Petina Gappah (Faber, UK)

Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean writer with law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University, and the University of Zimbabwe. Her short fiction and essays have been published in eight countries.

Singularity
by Charlotte Grimshaw (Vintage, New Zealand)

Charlotte Grimshaw's first novel was described as ‘New Zealand noir'. Grimshaw has contributed short fiction to anthologies, was awarded the 2006 Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Award, and published her first short story collection in 2007. Titled Opportunity, this collection was also short-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Ripples and other Stories
by Shih-Li Kow (Silverfish Books, Malaysia)

Shih-Li Kow was born in Kuala Lumpur. Her stories have been published in the anthologies, News from Home and Silverfish New Writing 7. Sh-li Kow holds a degree in chemical engineering.

The Pleasant Light of Day
by Philip O Ceallaigh (Penguin Ireland.)

Philip O Ceallaigh has lived and worked at a variety of jobs in Ireland, Spain, Russia, the United States, Kosovo and Georgia. He has lived mostly in Bucharest since 2000 where among other things he translates English subtitles for Romanian films. He has won the Glen Dimplex Award and the Rooney Prize for his first short story collection Notes from A Turkish Whorehouse which was also shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Award in 2006.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
by Wells Tower (FSG New York and Granta UK)

Wells Tower’s short stories and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, The Washington Post Magazine, and elsewhere. He received two Pushcart Prizes and the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review. He divides his time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina and Brooklyn, New York.

Love Begins in Winter
by Simon Van Booy (Harper Perennial New York)

Simon Van Booy was born in London and grew up in rural Wales and Oxford. After playing football in Kentucky, he lived in Paris and Athens. In 2002 he was awarded an MFA and won the H.R. Hays Poetry Prize. Van Booy is the author of The Secret Lives of People in Love. He lives in New York City.

This is a varied bunch geographically and in terms of experienced writers (two previously shortlisted for this prize) versus debutantes, yet not so varied in terms of small presses versus mainstream publishers - it would have been nice for a small-press-published collection to make the shortlist. Before accusations fly, yes, I am a small-press-published author and my collection was on the longlist! But with my editor's hat on, I know that many excellent collections have been published by small presses in the past year, because I have reviewed a number of them. Next year, perhaps?

The winner will be announced in Cork on September 20th at the closing ceremony of the tenth Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival. Before that, we have the winner of the Edge Hill Prize - which features one small-press-published short story collection on its five-book shortlist - to look forward to on Saturday July 4th. Good luck to all!

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Congratulations and Upcoming Deadlines

Congratulations... to Deborah Kay Davies, whose debut short story collection, Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful, has won the 2009 Wales Book of the Year.

and to Pasha Malla, who scooped the Canadian Trillium Book Award for his debut collection, The Withdrawal Method.

If you're inspired by these wins, here are some short story collection competitions whose deadlines are approaching:

June 30th The Drue Heinz Literature Prize

"The Drue Heinz Literature Prize recognizes and supports writers of short fiction and makes their work available to readers around the world. The award is open to writers who have published a book-length collection of fiction or at least three short stories or novellas in commercial magazines or literary journals."

July 15/Nov 15th The Story Prize

Eligibility for The Story Prize is restricted to collections of short fiction (at least two stories and/or novellas) by a living author, written in English. Eligible books must be first publication of the work in the United States during the calendar year, in either hardcover or paperback, and available for purchase by the general public. Collections must also include work previously unpublished in book form.

August 1st The Scotiabank Giller Prize

"The Scotiabank Giller Prize is worth $70,000 (Cdn) annually. A purse of $50,000 is awarded to the author of the best Canadian full-length novel or collection of short stories published in English. Each of the finalists will receive $5,000."

August 7th The Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize

"Established in 1997, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize recognizes Canadian writers of exceptional talent for the year's best novel or short-story collection."

See the full Short Review list of contests and awards for short story collections here.

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June issue out now!

With this issue we welcome TSR's new deputy editor, Diane Becker, very glad to have her!

And in a bumper issue this month (well, ok, it's the same size, but packed with goodness!)....Reviews of:

(click on the pic to read the review)

as well as interviews with Matt Bell, Mathias B. Freese, Josephine Rowe, Anne Donovan, Barry Graham and Pat Jourdan. Could you want more? I don't think so.

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So much great short story news!

Where to begin? What a week! The biggest short story news surely must be today's announcement that Canadian writer Alice Munro has won this year's Man Booker Prize. An award-winning short story writer, a recent article in the Canadian National Post newspaper reports that Munro pokes fun at the attitude to short stories in a new story of hers, Fiction, in which the main character discovers she is a character in a book.

"When she finds out it's not a novel, it's a collection of short stories, she's horrified," says her editor, Doug Gibson. In the story, Munro writes, "It was as if the author was hanging on the gates of literature rather than fully admitted inside because she was only writing short stories."

The Man Booker judges, Jane Smiley, writer; Amit Chaudhuri, writer, academic and musician; and writer, film script writer and essayist, Andrey Kurkov, said:

‘Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels. To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before.'

While those of us who understand very well the power of the short story would take issue with the "and yet" - we should hold our tongues and just celebrate this wonderful news that a stunning and inspirational writer has been recognised! Alice Munro's new collection, Too Much Happiness, will be published in October. Can't wait. Visit Alice Munro's Wikipedia page for more information.

Second, the Wales Book of the Year award English-language shortlist is announced, and it is novel-free: two short story collections and a collection of poetry, and all by female authors. Deborah Kay Davies' debut short story collection, Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful, a short story collection from award-winning novelist Gee Williams, Blood Etc, and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch's second collection of poetry, Not in These Shoes. Congratulations to all. The winner will be announced on June 15th.




Back to Canada, Pasha Malla has won the Danuta Gleed Literary Prize for his collection, The Withdrawal Method. Says the National Post:

The $10,000 prize – named in memory of the writer Danuta Gleed, and administered by the Writers' Union of Canada – toasts the nation's best English-language debut short fiction collection.

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What does the word "story" mean to you?

In honour of National Short Story Month over at the Emerging Writers Network (and just because we love short stories) , I thought I'd bring you a selection of the responses by authors The Short Review interviewed to the question "What does the word 'story' mean to you?".

Quite a few said it was a very difficult question. For some it means nothing, for others it is life itself.

The order is purely alphabetical, I've got as far as the Bs. There will be more! Click on the names to read the full author interviews. Here goes:

Warren Adler
To me story is fundamental and defines us as human beings. What happens next is the heart of the story and the pattern of all life which is a beginning, a middle and and an end. It is also the great mystery since no human being can ever know "what happens next.

Niki Aguirre
So many things, but due to my upbringing, I prefer those that are rich in the oral storytelling tradition. The best ones are the ones you get lost in: multilayered, babbling and chaotic, not necessary neat and linear. If you think about it, when you are sitting in a café or a pub telling a story, it seldom goes from point to point: the little asides are the best parts. Stories are often desperate things, dying to be voiced and heard -- nothing calm and organised about that. Although I admire people who can write succinctly and in an orderly fashion while still maintaining a good level of excitement. That’s something to strive for.

Allison Amend
This question is no softball. Stumped, I just did what I used to do when I was stumped in college, which is look up the word in the Oxford English Dictionary. It was no help, so I’m on my own. To me, a story is the relation of a brief, epiphanal (or at least very important and pivotal) moment in a character’s life. And the stuff you need around that to understand why the moment is so important. That’s in the literature sense. In a more general sense, a story is a narrative told for a specific reason (that reason can be to entertain, to impart a moral, to make the teller seem smart, to humiliate someone else, to teach, to ingratiate the teller to the tellee, etc.).

Elizabeth Baines
I think of something jewelled, dense, which will glow in the mind long after you have finished reading it.

Richard Bardsley
Anything that holds your interest as a reader.

Aimee Bender
A tough question! The feeling of holding onto a sparkling handrail into the dark.

Tom Bissell
Nothing, really, other than serving as a placeholder term for a certain kind of literary experience, which is itself as essentially variable as a medieval bestiary.

Kiril Bozhinov
Annihilation, mystification, unmasking, abstaining … anything but entertainment.

Hugh Brody
Something that is told and has a magic. Something that reaches out and holds because of the events it offers and follows. Something that offers both the fearful and comforting, though always there is a reassurance that the story exists, is told. I have heard such amazing stories from Inuit and other indigenous peoples, in their homes, around fires, in tents at night. These seemed to be the archetypes. Yet I know that there is a story in so many places, in a multitude of forms.

Jason Brown
It means why am I alive, why will I die, make me laugh, why are things this way, help me escape myself, don’t let me escape myself, lie to me, show me how I lie to myself, I can’t believe you said that, I can’t believe the things I remember are now only real to me.

Randall Brown
Oh, a lot of things, but I think the best stories end with haunting, either because of their profundity or their emotional resonance. The desire for these things—for meaning and feeling—maybe drives narratives into existence, a desire shared by the character(s), readers, and the author. That coming together of these entities around wanting something, desperately and urgently, gives reading and writing (for me) its charged intensity. The writer Douglas Glover says this of the short story, "Literature is a way of thinking in which you think by pushing your characters through a set of actions (testing that character in a series of scenes which involve the same conflict)." I think Aristotle said something profound about a story having a beginning, middle, and end. Joseph Campbell discovered in his reading the ONE way to tell a story, the Monomyth, which Kurt Vonnegut summarized as "The hero gets into trouble. The hero gets out of trouble." "Separation—initiation—return," writes Campbell, "might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth.” In describing the narrative pattern of journeys, such as Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, Clift and Clift argue that stories work to "help one make sense of the boredom before and the terror during each journey." Out of these ideas, a very simple, workable definition of plot and narrative structure emerges: As the result of some inciting incident, desire (the beginning of a story) creates actions (the story's middle) leading to an outcome (the end).

James Burr
"Vastly, and inexplicably underrated, form of prose." I love short stories and I just don't understand why the publishing industry, and indeed many readers too, look down upon them. In these times of multi-media saturation and short attention spans surely the short story is THE medium of our times! Surely, just being able to dip in and out of a book whenever you have a few minutes to spare is the way we should all be reading now? Yet stories continue to be seen as the immature, less-devloped sibling to the novel, or worse, as a training ground for aspiring novelists. In my opinion, a good short story collection should always be superior to a good novel - the sheer range of narrative voices that can be used, the variety of characters, the number of ideas that can be explored.... Then again, while I don't write genre fiction I come from a genre background, so I see a short story as having "a point." When you read a story by Philip.K. Dick or Ray Bradbury or Clive Barker there is a definite purpose to the story - it is complete in and of itself. I wonder if the reason many people don't like reading short stories is because they read stories that are essentially notes for abandoned novels masquerading as "mood pieces" or half-formed vignettes pretending to be "character studies." This is a failing I often see in more "literary" short story collections, and it annoys me intensely. A story should be complete in itself, whether it be 1000, 5000 or 20000 words long. It isn't just "a short piece of prose" that isn't long enough to be padded up into a novel, nor is it just a single, clever idea. That isn't a short story. That's a vignette, or even, dare I say, a joke.

How would you answer the question?

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Frank O'Connor Longlist 2009

Hot on the heels of last week's Edge Hill Short Story Prize shortlist comes the list of short story collections longlisted for the 2009 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award - now renamed the The Cork City – Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. With a prize of €35,000 for the winning book, this is theworld's most lucrative award for a short story collection.

However, this is not all about how large the winner's cheque is. This year, the longlist has 57 short story collections - up from 38 last year - which means that publishers are definitely catching on to the prestige and exposure that comes with this award, where all eligible titles are longlisted. As I mentioned last week, this is a wonderful move on the part of the organisers, giving much-needed publicity to many, many books not published by mainstream publishers but by small presses without teams of publicists (including my own collection, The White Road and Other Stories). What is also wonderful is that "big" names are alongside newer writers, showcasing that the short story is not just the province of those who have yet to "graduate" to novels!

“We could have had another twenty entries but for many publishers missing the deadline," said declares Award administrator Patrick Cotter of the Munster Literature Centre in Cork. "We couldn’t bend the rules to allow late entries, there were simply too many titles already on the judges’ table this year. Next year we will have to consider a preliminary weeding-out before the publication of a longlist. But it is gratifying to see an explosion in short story publishing: encouraging short story publishing is the main raison d’etre of the award."

Here is the longlist, ordered by country, with links to those we have already reviewed:


15 American Authors:

Eleanor Bluestein, Tea and Other Ayama Na Tales, BkMk Press (University of

Missouri-Kansas City) review coming soon

Bonnie Jo Cambell, American Salvage,Wayne State University Press

Dennis Cooper, Ugly Man: Stories, Harper Perennial

David Eagleman, Sum, Pantheon Books (Random House)

Mary Gaitskill, Don’t Cry, Pantheon Books (Random House)

Lauren Groff, Delicate Edible Bird, Hyperion

Daniel A. Hoyt, Then We Saw The Flames, University of Massachusetts Press

Ian MacMillan, Our People, BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City)

James Mathews, Last Known Position, University of North Texas Press

Christopher Meeks, Months and Season, White Whisker Books

Lydia Peelle, Reasons for and Advantage of Breathing, Harper Perennial

Andrew Porter, The Theory of Light and Matter, University of Georgia Press

Glen Pourciau, Invite, University of Iowa Press

Midge Raymond, Forgetting English, Eastern Washington University Press review coming soon

Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Farrar, Straus and Giroux


18 British Authors:

Anthony Cropper, Nature’s Magician, Route review coming soon

Jane Feaver, Love Me Tender, Harvill Secker (The Random House Group)

Paul Flynn, Crossing the Border, CC Publishing

Tania Hershman, The White Road and Other Stories, Salt Publishing

Sue Hubbard, Rothko’s Red, Salt Publishing

Kazuo Ishiguro, Nocturnes, Faber and Faber Limited review coming soon

Sushma Joshi, The End of the World, FinePrint Books

Alex Keegan, Ballistics, Salt Publishing review coming soon

Charles Lambert, The Scent of Cinnamon, Salt Publishing

James Lasdun, It’s Beginning to Hurt, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Tom Lee, Greenfly, Harvill Secker (The Random House Group)

Frederick Lightfoot, Fetish and Other Stories, Superscript

André Mangeot, A Little Javanese, Salt Publishing

Sean O’Brien, The Silence Room, Comma Press

John Saul, As Rivers Flow, Salt Publishing

Ali Smith, The First Person, Penguin Group Canada review coming soon

Mark Illis, Tender, Salt Publishing review coming soon

Simon Van Booy, Love Begins in Winter, Harper Perennial


5 Canadian Authors:


Tricia Dower, Silent Girl, Innana Publications and Education Inc.

Hannah Holborn, Fierce, McClelland & Stewart

Pamela Stewart, Elysium, Anvil Press

Deborah Willis, Vanishing and Other Stories, Penguin Group Canada

Kuzhali Manickavel, Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings, Blaft Publications


1 Dutch Author:

Arnon Grunberg, Amuse-Bouche, Comma Press


1 Estonian Author:

Kristiina Ehin, A Priceless Nest, Oleander Press


1 German Author:

Maike Wetzel (Trans. Lyn Marven), Long Days, Comma Press


1 Icelandic Author:

Gyrơir Elíasson (Trans. Victoria Cribb), Stone Tree, Comma Press


2 Indian Authors:

Jahnavi Barua, Next Door, Penguin Books ( India )

Jasmine Anita Yvette D’Costa, Curry is Thicker Than Water, BookLand Press



4 Irish Authors:

Michael J. Farrell, Life in the Universe, The Stinging Fly Press

Robert Graham, The Only Living Boy, Salt Publishing

Alan McMonagle, Liar, Liar, Words on the Street review coming soon

Philip Ó Ceallaigh, The Pleasant Light of Day, Penguin Ireland


1 Macedonian Author:

Kiril Bozhinov, Eclipses: Stories of Disappearances and Reappearance, Beyond Art Productions


1 Malaysian Author:

Shih-Li-Kow, Ripples and Other Short Stories, Silverfish Books


2 New Zealand Authors:

Jeanette Galpin, Aroha and the River, Maungatiro Press of Marton

Charlotte Grimshaw Singularity, Vintage


2 Nigerian Authors:

Sefi Atta, Lawless, Farafina Books

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck, Fourth Estate LTD


1 Spanish Author:

Empar Moliner (Trans. Peter Bush), I Love You When I’m Drunk, Comma Press


1 Ukrainian Author:

Sana Krasikov, One More Year, Portobello Books Ltd


1 Zimbabwean Author

Petina Gappah, An Elegy for Easterly, Faber and Faber Limited review coming soon


Congratulations to all these authors, and may this bring a much larger readership for short stories. The judges for the award are an American, an Irishman and a Pole: Lloren A. Foster, Milka Jankowska and Vincent McDonnell, who will be choosing a shortlist of 5 titles, to be announced in late June, and a winner in September.

For more on the award visit The Munster Literature Centre. Click here for last year's longlist.

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