Voyage of Discovery Leads to a Prize

Yesterday's Shelf Awareness had an item telling about the reaction of UK Guardian blogger Nicholas Lezard to

the announcement that Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth had won the Frank O'Connor award outright when the judges chose to dispense with a shortlist (Shelf Awareness, July 7, 2008).

To learn more, I clicked on the link to Lezard's July 7 post:

Give Us Back Our Shortlists
The judges should have given a handful of writers the chance to put 'shortlisted for a Frank O'Connor award' on their next book

Call me provincial, but I'd never heard of the Frank O'Connor award, so I Googled it and was led to the home page of The Munster Literature Centre. (Its title bar just reads "Home Page." How dumb is that?) At the top it congratulates "new O'Connor laureate" Lahiri.

Below the little book jacket image and to the right of Lahiri's enormous headshot (oh, by the way, she's gorgeous; hmm...) is an announcement for The Sean O'Faolain Short Story Prize, which I'd also never heard of. But here's where it gets good:

• The competition is open to original unpublished short stories in the English language of 3,000 words or less. The story can be on any subject, in any style by a writer of any nationality, living anywhere in the world.
  

• Entry deadline is July 31st 2008.
  

• The winners will be announced at the International Frank O’Connor Festival of the Short Story in Cork in September. The winners will be invited to read their prize winning stories at the festival.
  

• First Prize: €1,500 (approx US$2300) and publication in the literary biannual Southword.
  

• Second Prize: €500 (approx US$790) and publication in Southword.
  

• Four other shortlisted entries will be selected for publication in Southword and receive a fee of €100 euros (approx US$158).

See full competition rules here.