Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009

Sponsored by Davy Byrnes

Organised by The Stinging Fly in association with The Irish Times

€25,000 for the best short story

+

5 runners-up prizes of €1,000.

Competition Judge: Richard Ford

June 24th 2009

Claire Keegan wins Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award

Congratulations to Claire Keegan on last night winning the 2009 Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award.

Read the Irish Times report here.

Richard Ford’s Citation for the winning story–

“Foster” puts on display an imposing array of formal beauties at the service of a deep and profound talent. It tells a conceivably simple story – a young child given up to grieving foster parents and then woefully wrested home again. Claire Keegan makes the reader sure that there are no simple stories, and that art is essential to life. In lifting a homely rural existence to our moral notice, she brings a thrilling synaesthetic instinct for the unexpected right word, and exhibits patient attention to life’s vast consequence and finality. She knows when to linger and never does so without profit, and indeed is never timid about saying more when less would be less. In this way she is a generous writer, always urging her sentences onward, adventurously extending our understanding, upping the ante, never obscuring or taking shelter in what can’t be known. Yet sparkling talent aside, this is by no means a gaudy story – but a rather muted and decorous one entrusted to the voice of a child infused with the imagination of a seer. And yet to read it word upon word (as one must) is to experience a high-wire act of uncommon narrative virtuosity.

—Richard Ford

Claire Keegan was raised on a farm in Wicklow. She completed her undergraduate studies at Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana and subsequently earned an MA at The University of Wales and an M.Phil at Trinity College, Dublin. Her first collection of stories, Antarctica, was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. Her second, Walk the Blue Fields, was published in May 2007.

Her stories have won several awards including The Hugh Leonard Bursary, The Macaulay Fellowship, The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, The Martin Healy Prize, The Olive Cook Award, The Kilkenny Prize, The Tom Gallon Award and The William Trevor Prize, judged by William Trevor. Twice was Keegan the recipient of the Francis MacManus Award. She was also a Wingate Scholar. She lives in Wexford.

Claire was the first writer interviewed in The Stinging Fly back in 2000 just after she had won the Rooney Prize for her first collection.

The six writers shortlisted were: Claire Keegan, Mary Leland, Eoin McNamee, Molly McCloskey, Kathleen Murray and Susan Stairs.

We hope to publish the six shortlisted stories later this year.

Richard Ford’s shortlist citations and bios are here.