SHORT STORY PRIZE 2014

2014 INTERNATIONAL SHORT STORY PRIZE

First Prize: £500 + publication    Second prize: £100

Open for entries January 1st – March 31st

Entry fee: £10 – submit up to 2 stories and receive a copy of our next issue (worth £10). £5 – submit 1 story. Stories must be no longer than 5,000 words and must be unpublished in print or online. All entries will also be considered for general publication. Stories may be in any theme or genre and you can submit as many times as you like. Online entries only. After making your payment via the Paypal buttons below, please submit your entries to shortfiction2010@googlemail.com with ‘Competition Entry’ in the subject box. The shortlist will be announced in June, the winner and runner-up in July. Please read competition rules here before entering. This year’s judge is prize-winning author Gerard Donovan, whose novels, poems and short stories have received critical acclaim.

FABER ACADEMY IN DUBLIN

PHOTOGRAPH BY ÓRFHLAITH FOYLE


The Faber Academy is coming to Dublin in April next year. Gerard Donovan and Claire Keegan will teach a course called 'The Art of the Short Story' at Newman House on Thursday 16 to Sunday 19 April 2009.

The blurb rather cryptically states: 'How to Create More Room Using Less Space: How to create more room in a small apartment? Make the walls into mirrors, get rid of half the furniture, and render yourself invisible.' I mean, I know what they are getting at, but why be so weirdly obscure? Anyhow...

The course costs a pretty €630, is set over four days and the teachers will 'explore how to transform everyday experience from statements into suggestion that is both intellectually and emotionally significant. Using discussions and exercises, the workshops will address the elements of the form - among them setting, characters, time, structure and how fiction forms a temporal arc - while pondering how short story writers use detail, and the lack of it, to cast the spell of that single effect.'

Claire is a great teacher, I know from experience, and Gerard is a fine writer, so all in all I'm sure it will be a fabulous few days. Expect to learn loads.

See the Faber site here for more.