About the award
The category is open to single stories which have been published either in collections or in literary magazines. Collections of stories cannot be entered in this category Stories submitted must have been published in English or Irish during the qualifying period. Writing.ie offers a huge range of services to the Irish literary community.
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Writing.ie Short Story of the Year Winner 2020
I Ate It All And I Really Thought I Wouldn’t
by Caoilinn Hughes
Caoilinn Hughes is the author of Orchid & the Wasp (Oneworld 2018), which won the Collyer Bristow Prize, was shortlisted for the Hearst Big Book Awards, the Butler Literary Award and longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. Her poetry collection, Gathering Evidence (Carcanet 2014), won the Shine/Strong Award and was shortlisted for four other prizes. Her work has appeared in Granta, POETRY, Tin House, Best British Poetry, BBC Radio 3 and elsewhere. She has a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and she was recently Visiting Writer at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. For her short fiction, she won The Moth International Short Story Prize 2018 and an O.Henry Prize in 2019.
Previous Winners
2020 – I Ate it all and I Really Thought I Wouldn’t by Caoilinn Hughes
2019 – Parrot by Nicole Flattery
2018 – How to Build a Space Rocket by Roisin O’Donnell
2017 – Back to Bones by Christine Dwyer Hickey
2016 – The Visit by Orla McAlinden
2015 – A Slanting of the Sun by Donal Ryan
2014 – Rest Day by John Boyne
2013 – The Things We Lose The Things We Leave Behind by Billy O’Callaghan