Young Irish author Sally Rooney, whose debut novel Conversations with Friends will be published by Faber in June, has made the shortlist for the £30,000 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, along with four American writers and one British author.
Also shortlisted US writer Kathleen Alcott, author of The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets and Infinite Home; Bret Anthony Johnston, director of creative writing at Harvard University and author of the bestselling novel Remember Me Like This; the sole British writer and poet Richard Lambert; Victor Lodato, winner of the PEN USA Award for his novel Mathilda Savitch; Celeste Ng, author of the New York Times bestseller Everything I Never Told You, and whose second novel Little Fires Everywhere will be published by Little Brown later this year.
At £30,000 for the winner, this is the world’s richest and most prestigious prize for an English-language single short story. Previous winners include Chinese American writer Yiyun Li (2015), three Pulitzer prizewinners - US author Adam Johnson (2014), US-Dominican author Junot Diaz (2013) and US author Anthony Doerr (2011), Kevin Barry from Ireland (2012), and CK Stead from New Zealand (2010).
This year’s judges are Booker Prize-winning author Anne Enright; broadcaster and author Mark Lawson; Booker-shorltisted author Neel Mukherjee; Orange and Whitbread prize-winning author Rose Tremain; and Andrew Holgate, literary editor of The Sunday Times.
Mukherjee said: “A set of stories, first read blind by the judges, that does everything the best of the form is capable of and more: in their ways with meaning, their emotional charge, their power to move, their seemingly effortless negotiation of the punishing nature of the form, their navigation of time, all of them are little gems.”
Fiona Shaw and Simon Callow will read the stories at Foyles, Charing Cross Road, London on April 26th. The winner will be announced at Stationers’ Hall in London on April 27th. The five runners-up will each receive £1,000.
Three other Irish writers were longlisted: Lisa McInerney, Christine Dwyer Hickey and Ethel Rohan.
Readers can read the shortlisted entries, one a day from March 20th, at the prize's website shortstoryaward.co.uk.
