Short Stories get their rightful place in the Irish Book Awards!!

It's brilliant news that www.writing.ie, the brainchild of Vanessa O'Loughlin, is behind the creation of this New Irish Book Award for Short Story of the Year .....

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Writing.ie is very excited to announce a new category in the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards – a much anticipated recognition of a form that Irish writers excel at – the Writing.ie Short Story of the Year Award.

The Irish short story has a distinctive place in the modern Irish literary tradition. Many of Ireland’s most celebrated writers, both in English and Irish, have been practitioners of the genre, its roots without doubt, in our ancient tradition of story-telling. Indeed, many award winning novelists have launched their careers with short stories, gaining recognition through a form that the internet has breathed new life into, by providing writers with new places to publish, making their work accessible to millions of potential readers with the click of a mouse.

From Conan Doyle’s adventures of Sherlock Holmes to James Joyce’s “epiphanies”, as Flannery O’Connor put it, in Writing Short Stories. “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experience meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you to experience that meaning more fully.”

This new category in the prestigious Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards, the Writing.ie Short Story of the Year Award, is open to short stories of up to 7000 words published between 1st Nov 2012 and 31st October 2013 in any of the following contexts: a collection of short stories by a single author; an anthology of short stories; or an established journal or magazine, digital or print, that has been in existence for at least six months within the period of eligibility.

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