Short Story Competition: More than 1,000 short stories were received for the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award, the winner of which will be announced in Dublin on Tuesday. Shane Hegarty reports
When Leopold Bloom slipped into Davy Byrnes pub for gorgonzola sandwiches washed down with Burgundy, he had no idea what he was starting. A century on, and the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award has whittled 1,100 entries down to a short-list of six, each of whom is guaranteed €1,000. On Tuesday, one of these writers will walk away with a €20,000 prize donated by the Dublin pub to mark the centenary of Bloomsday and to honour Ulysses and its author James Joyce.
"It seemed a pretty obvious thing to do," says Michel Doran, a co-owner of the pub with his brother Redmond. "We've always attracted the numbers each Bloomsday and felt we owed the literary world to a certain extent. It's hard to explain, but it's not a business decision. It won't increase our turnover. We just thought it was about time we did something."
It has been a real success. The judges - authors Tobias Wolff, and A.L. Kennedy and The Irish Times Literary Editor Caroline Walsh - came to an agreement via the less traditional route of a telephone conference call. "That was an asset, actually. I thought it might be a bit surreal but the three-way connection made it a much more focused discussion, with everyone speaking out loud and clear for the stories they liked," says Walsh.
The standard impressed each of them. "I expected the standard to be very high and I was not disappointed," says Kennedy. "Ireland is the only country where I'm not embarrassed to say what I do for a living. People don't then ask, 'but what do you really do?' In the stories, there was a delight in language that only comes from a place where a good section of people are comfortable with language. There was a lot of playfulness with language, huge fun with it."
"I wish it had been easier to lay stories aside, but each in some way commanded my attention. There was tremendous power and great variety," says Wolff. Did he see much of a Joycean influence, given the nature of the competition? "Joyce is in everybody's stories. He's in my stories, at least I hope he is. He is so pervasive now that there are writers influenced by him who don't even realise it."
He was delighted that many of the writers drew from colloquial language as well as literary language; something which he found to be "bracing and a tonic". Did one of the modern masters of the short story find that the writers had a proper understanding of the genre? "It was varied. I would say that about half of those that I read had a very fine sense of form. Perhaps some would have been more comfortable with the novel form, and they were writing a novel in brief, or at least part of a novel. They were still learning. But that was a minority, really. Ireland, like the US and Russia, has a particular genius for the short story."
Of repeating themes, the judges found plenty of madness, degradation, deranged children - and impatience with bureaucracy. Some of the stories represented the underside of 21st-century Ireland, with slick, sardonic humour and irreverent, ironic characters. "I noticed that in these portrayals of Irish people men aren't coming out too well," adds Walsh. "They are the underdogs. There is a sense of women more in the ascendent, sometimes stridently so." The award was open to Irish citizens or residents, but received entries from all over the world. While the writing was often concerned with Irish issues, it was more international in its sensibilities, with several of the works not set in Ireland at all.
The stories were given to the judges anonymously. "It's a nice thing, because when you are reading things blind then you know the titles not the authors," says Kennedy. "Other competitions can be a bit ropey. This, though, had a respectful amount of prize money. There was no subject matter stipulated. I'm so tired of that, because you would never tell a novelist what to write. This is a grown up, proper prize. It's about writing and writers getting a fair crack of the whip, which is what you really want."
It will, however, be a one-off. "It seems to be right with the year that's in it," says Michel Doran, "but we couldn't afford to hand over that kind of prize again." Short Story Competition