Saturday, October 19th

Ó Faoláin Prize Reading

3.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5 tickets here

The Seán Ó Faoláin International Short Story Prize is awarded to the best single story entered in competition from anywhere in the world. The winner receives a first prize of €2000, a featured reading at the Cork International Short Story Festival (with four-night hotel stay and full board) and publication in Southword. The 1st Prize winner, Jack Kennedy will read his winning story 'Snap'. This year's judge was Camilla Grudova (who is also the 2024 recipient of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship). Find more details about winners and shortlisted stories on our Awards page.

Jack Kennedy is from Tinnahalla, Co Kerry and currently works as a biochemist in a Dublin hospital. He has been a voracious reader all his life, gorging himself on anything he could get his hands on. In particular, he enjoys stories with dark comedic undertones, inventive use of vernacular and distinctive voice. He writes short fiction and is currently working on a novel. This is his first publication.

Anne Devlin & Sarah Gilbert

4.30pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5 tickets here

Anne Devlin is a short story writer, playwright and screenwriter. In the 1980s she wrote Ourselves Alone for the Royal Court Theatre followed in the 1990s with After Easter for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her prize-winning original work for screen, Naming the Names, was based on a story from her first collection, The Waypaver (Faber, 1986), while her original screenplay, The Venus de Milo Instead, was directed by Danny Boyle for BBC NI. Film adaptations include Wuthering Heights for Paramount Pictures and Titanic Town for BBC Films. Since returning from London in 2007 she’s written The Forgotten for BBC Radio 4, literary essays, and serves as Literary Editor of Fortnight. The Apparitions (Arlen House) is her second short fiction collection.

Buy The Apparitions (Arlen House).

“These stories are quirky and lovely, shining with moments of glad grace. There is nothing quite like them in contemporary Irish fiction. Anne Devlin has her own original, arresting way of looking at the world, and of writing. Funky, sparkling, wise and wonderful.” — Martina Evans

Sarah Gilbert has been living in Mile End, Montreal since 1990. Stories from her popular blog on changes in the neighbourhood were featured in the book Histoire du Mile End by Yves Desjardins and her fiction has appeared in a variety of literary journals. Gilbert has worked as a freelance writer and a radio producer and is a faculty member at Dawson College where she teaches literature. Our Lady of Mile End is her first book. Instagram: @ourladyofmileend

Buy Our Lady of Mile End (Anvil Press).

“Sarah Gilbert writes of an old neighbourhood that is disappearing and being born anew. Her stories are as vibrant and intimate as drinking a cup of coffee on a stoop while gossiping with a neighbour in their housecoat.” — Heather O’Neill

(Moderator) Patrick Holloway’s debut novel, The Language of Remembering, will be published in February 2025 by Epoque Press. He is the winner of the Bath Short Story Award, The Allingham Fiction Prize, The Flash 500 Prize and The Molly Keane Creative Writing Prize. He is an editor of the literary journal, The Four Faced Liar.

Rosemary Jenkinson & Sally Wen Mao

7.30pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5 tickets here

Rosemary Jenkinson is a short story writer, playwright and poet. She particularly loves the short story as she fervently believes life is too short for long literature. Her short story collections are Contemporary Problems, Aphrodite’s Kiss, Catholic Boy (shortlisted for the EU Prize for Literature), Lifestyle Choice 10mgs (shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize) and Marching Season. Her recent collection of short stories Love in the Time of Chaos (Arlen House) was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. The Irish Times has praised her fiction for ‘an elegant wit, terrific characterization and an absolute sense of her own particular Belfast’.

Buy Love in the Time of Chaos (Arlen House).

“‘Against a backdrop of Brexit, The Covid-19 pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis and the lingering shadows of The Troubles, Jenkinson explores love, or what is perhaps more appropriately described as desire, in times of chaos. Hers are lusty, skin-hungry characters, seeking not only the touch of another but escape, forgiveness and ultimately, a better existence.” — Brigid O’Dea

Sally Wen Mao is the author of the fiction collection Ninetails: Nine Tales (Penguin Books, May 2024). She is also the author of three books of poetry: The Kingdom of Surfaces (Graywolf, 2023), a finalist for the Maya Angelou Book Award, Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), a finalist for the 2020 Los Angeles Book Prize in Poetry, and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). The recipient of an NEA grant, a Cullman fellowship, a Shearing fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes, Mao lives and teaches in New York City.

Buy Ninetails: Nine Tales (Penguin) and visit the author's website.

“Fiercely imaginative and nourished by a wild subterranean river of magic, folklore, and futuristic myth, Sally Wen Mao’s Ninetails is a beguiling book and one that challenges the reader to conjure strange new modes of subverting oppression. Long a luminary of the poetry world, Sally Wen Mao proves here that she is an unstoppable, incandescent force in prose as well.” — Alexandra Kleeman

(Moderator) Sarah Harte has won or been shortlisted for prizes in Ireland and the UK including The Bryan MacMahon short story prize, The Bridport Prize, the Manchester Fiction Prize, the Seán Ó Faoláin International Short Story Prize, and the Fish Short Story Prize. She has also published two novels.

Elwin Cotman & Manuel Muñoz

9.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5 tickets here

Elwin Cotman is a storyteller from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of five books: the poetry collection The Wizard’s Homecoming, and the short story collections The Jack Daniels Sessions EP, Hard Times Blues, Dance on Saturday, and Weird Black Girls. His debut novel The Age of Ignorance will be published by Scribner in 2025. He has worked as a video game consultant and writer for Square Enix. He holds a BA from the University of Pittsburgh and a MFA from Mills College.

Buy Weird Black Girls (Simon & Schuster) and visit the author's website.

“I’m enraptured by his writing, his every paragraph rich in wisdom and wit, his stories somehow rough and refined both, a brilliant mix of perversity and common sense, of the sacred and the profane.” — Timothy Schaffert

Manuel Muñoz is the author of three collections of short stories: The Consequences, published by Graywolf Press in 2022, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue and Zigzagger. A novel, What You See in the Dark, was published in 2011. In 2023 Muñoz received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and won the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He is also the recipient of a 2008 Whiting Writers Award, and was a finalist for the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2007 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. The Consequences was longlisted for the Story Prize.

Buy The Consequences (The Indigo Press) and visit the author's website.

“Lucid and elegantly written, The Consequences tells the stories of characters who ache for one another or for ephemeral moments of release; who ache—bodily—from a life spent harvesting the sweetness that will grace other tables.” — Carolina A. Miranda

(Moderator) Billy O’Callaghan is the author of four novels and four collections, including, The Boatman and Other Stories (Jonathan Cape, 2020). His stories have appeared in Agni, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Saturday Evening Post, The Stinging Fly and elsewhere. His latest novel, The Paper Man, was published by Cape in 2023.

Image credits: Rosemary Jenkinson photographed by Stuart Bailie, Sally Wen Mao photographed by Jelani Ameer, Manuel Muñoz photographed by John D and Catherine T (MacArthur Foundation)