SHORT STORY AWARD:Richard Ford is to be the sole judge of the second Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award
REDMOND DORAN, co-owner of Davy Byrnes, called me up last November and said he wanted to do it all again. If this were a short story, I might begin it like that. A character is introduced, a situation set up: I'd hope I'd grabbed the reader's attention.
In late 2003, I was in the right place at the right time when Doran first contacted the James Joyce Centre with a proposal to sponsor what would become the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award, Ireland's biggest ever short story competition for a single short story. Organised by the James Joyce Centre as part of their Bloomsday centenary celebrations in 2004, and run in association with this paper, the award was supposed to be a once-off affair.
Davy Byrnes was of course immortalised in Ulysseswhere it was described as a "moral pub". Owned by the Doran family since 1941 (the un-chatty Davy Byrne died in 1939), it would be fair to say the establishment hasn't done too badly out of its association with Messrs Bloom and Joyce down through the years. Sponsoring an award that would represent a very real opportunity for those alive and writing today was seen by the Dorans as being the most appropriate way to acknowledge the association and to discharge any debt that might be owed to Dublin's most famous dead writer. The idea was simplicity itself: a competition open to all Irish citizens and residents to write a short story, with no restriction on theme, subject matter or number of words. As with much else in the arts, however, it's not so easy to quantify the success or failure of a writing competition. And yet the first award with its €20,000 top prize and its panel of judges (AL Kennedy, Caroline Walsh and Tobias Wolff) certainly did make its mark. First and foremost, it encouraged more than 1,100 people to write and submit a short story. Then, the six short-listed writers included Philip Ó Ceallaigh and Kevin Barry, both of whom have since gone on in consecutive years to publish debut short story collections and to win the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. And of course Anne Enright, who eventually won the prize for her short story Honey, last year scooped the Man Booker.
More than anything else, it was Enright's success with her novel The Gatheringlast October that prompted Redmond Doran's decision to fund the award for a second time. It would be wrongheaded to make any claims that the winning of one award had led to the winning of another. What any decent award can do, however, is free up the writer to get on with work by providing him or her with much-needed encouragement and some even-more-needed cash.
And so the story continues. From next Wednesday, we'll begin receiving entries for next year's award. My hope would be that we will receive even more entries this time and that come next June we will have a shortlist of six short stories that we can truly celebrate and enjoy. The task of deciding that shortlist and choosing the eventual winner will fall to a single judge this time: the great American writer Richard Ford, who is both an acclaimed exponent of the short story form and one of its leading champions. Upon agreeing to judge the second Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award, Ford said he hoped he'd be able to "recognise excellence in whatever form, style, length, etc it comes in" and that he'd "like to be won over, for the choice to be easy, for the chosen short story to dictate all the terms of its own brilliance and for [him] to be just a helpless celebrant".
Well, I don't think the final decision should necessarily be made all that easy for us or for him. Get those stories coming in now!
Declan Meade, publisher and editor of The Stinging Fly, is the administrator of the prize. He has edited two anthologies of short stories: These Are Our Lives(2006) and Let's Be Alone Together, published this month.
DAVY BYRNES AWARD
The 2009 Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Awardis being organised by The Stinging Flyin association with The Irish Times. Entries will be accepted from Wednesday October 1st to Monday February 2nd 2009. A €10 entry fee must accompany each entry. €25,000 will be awardednext June for the best short story with €1,000 for the five other short-listed stories. The competition rules and entry form are available on irishtimes.comand on davybyrnesaward.org