Irish writer scoops world's biggest short story prize

The Munster Literature Centre in Ireland has announced that, in its tenth year, the winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award is Irish author Colin Barrett for his debut collection Young Skins.
The €25,000 award is the single most lucrative in the world for a collection of short stories and is named after the writer whom W.B. Yeats described as the Irish Chekov. The award has been hugely influential in raising the profile and esteem of the short story form in recent years. Previous winners have included Haruki Murakami, Edna O'Brien, Ron Rash and Yiyun Li amongst others.
The Award is co-sponsored by The School of English, University College Cork and Cork City Council, and was founded to encourage publishers to issue more collections of stories by individual authors - and to acknowledge Cork's special relationship with the short story: not only Frank O'Connor but also William Trevor, Elizabeth Bowen and Sean O'Faolain hail from Cork.
The international jury for the award consisted of Irish poet Mathew Sweeney, Anglo-Canadian novelist Alison MacLeod and American novelist Manuel Gonzales. Patrick Cotter, Artistic Director of the Munster Literature Centre selects the jury and acts as non-voting chairman.
Explaining the judges decision Alison MacLeod said of Colin Barrett's debut: 'How dare a debut writer be this good? Young Skins has all the hallmarks of an instant classic. Barrett's prose is exquisite but never rarefied. His characters — the damaged, the tender-hearted and the reckless — are driven by utterly human experiences of longing. His stories are a thump to the heart, a mainline surge to the core. His vision is sharp, his wit is sly, and the stories in this collection come alive with that ineffable thing - soul.'
The book was first published in Ireland by the Stinging Fly Press in 2013, and has been published in the UK this year by Jonathan Cape - it is set to be published in the United States by Grove Atlantic in spring of 2015. The book will be published in translation in the Netherlands by De Bezige Bij, in November 2014 and in France, Editions Rivages in 2015. DMC Film, the production company set up by Michael Fassbender and Conor McCaughan in 2010, are optioning the longest story in the collection Calm With Horses to adapt for feature film release.
Colin Barrett grew up in Mayo and studied English at UCD. After graduating he worked for several years with a mobile phone provider in its Dublin headquarters, continuing to write in his spare time. Ultimately, he left his job to do an MA in Creative Writing at University College Dublin. In 2009 he was awarded the Penguin Ireland Prize and he received bursaries from the Arts Council in 2011 and 2013. Young Skins is Colin's first book. His stories have previously featured in The Stinging Fly magazine, as well as in the anthologies, Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails (Stinging Fly Press, 2010) and Town and Country (Faber and Faber, 2013).
He said: “Consider me knocked splendidly sideways by the news. It's a bewilderment and honour to be awarded the 2014 Frank O'Connor prize. The shortlist was superb, and the role call of previous winners - including living legends like Edna O'Brien and Haruki Murakami - is humbling. Many thanks to those who helped me along the way, especially the Stinging Fly Press, who first published Young Skins and were instrumental in its creation, and a deep thanks to the judges, the organizers, and to the Munster Literature Centre for continuing to care about the short story"
The award will be presented in September at the closing of the Cork International Short Story Festival which is the world's oldest annual short story festival.