Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award

We're very pleased to announce that Cynthia Flood, C.P. Boyko, Kathy Page and K.D. Miller were just long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Worth €25,000, the award is the biggest prize for short stories worldwide.

Journey Prize-winning author, Cynthia Flood's Red Girl Rat Boy is a precise collection of minimalist stories that explore the lives of innumerable wives, husbands, sisters, and in-laws vexed by short temper and insecurity and trying to navigate through upheaval with grace. 

C.P. Boyko's Novelists is a comedy of manners (and manuscripts), rivaling Vanity Fair for its satirical wit... though not, mercifully, for its length.

Orange Prize-nominee Kathy Page's Paradise and Elsewhere is a collection of dark fables at once familiar and entirely strange.

K.D. Miller has been nominated for a National Magazine Award for Fiction. Her short story collection, All Saints is a moving collection of tremendous skill, whose linked stories illuminate the tenacity and vulnerability of modern-day believers.

Hearty congratulations to all the long-listed authors!

4 Biblioasis Titles on Frank O'Connor Longlist

Congratulations to C.P. Boyko, Nancy Jo Cullen, Colette Maitland, and Nadine McInnis, whose short fiction collections were just longlisted for the Frank O'Connor Award!

About the Frank O'Connor Award

The 2011 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize is worth €25,000 to the winning author of a collection of short stories published for the first time, in English anywhere in the world, between July 2011 and June 2012 (selecteds, collecteds or books containing stories published in a previous volume of stories by the author will not be eligible). Translations are eligible.

This prestigious international short story award in the memory of Frank O’Connor is the single biggest prize in the world for a collection of short stories.

In honouring Cork’s literary genius and its most famous short story writer, it is hoped this award will achieve international recognition for the short story and highlight Cork’s important contribution to this literary art form.

This major international prize celebrating the city’s intimate relationship with the short story was established as part of the literary programme of Cork’s tenure as European Capital of Culture. Since then it has made possible through the generous support of Cork City Council.

It is hoped the Award, for a complete collection of previously unpublished stories in a book collection, will play a significant role in establishing parity of esteem for the short story collection alongside the novel.

Rosenblum & "Social Short Fiction"; The Frank O'Connor Longlist

Well we're going to take a short (very short!) break from poesy to mention the three titles that were just longlisted for the Frank O'Connor Award. Congratulations to Laura Boudreau, Alice Petersen, and Rebecca Rosenblum!





The Big Dream has also been reviewed in the lastest issue of Prairie Fire, which you should definitely check out, not least for its four new poems by Sylvia Legris. (See? I told you the poesy-break wouldn't last long). Here's what reviewer Bob Armstrong had to say:

"We tend to think that the American Dream, or its Canadian cousin, is a subject for a novel, rather than a work of short fiction. Portraying our great big world, bringing to life success and failure, youth and age, wealth and poverty – that’s the job for the novel, and not just any novel: the “social novel.” Toronto writer Rebecca Rosenblum may make us re-examine that assumption with her short story collection The Big Dream. Call it, perhaps, the “social short story collection” ... The Big Dream is real life. For readers who want fiction that engages with the world we live in, Rosenblum’s work matters."