well, the issue is out… weather’s lagging behind a bit.
Two Kevin Barry readings coming up:
July 2 Chapelizod Community Festival
Reading with Nuala Ní Chonchúir
Venue:- Phoenix Park (Park Lane Gate)
Time:- 7 p.m.
Tickets:- €5
July 7 West Cork Literary Festival
Venue:- Bantry Library, Bridge Street
Time:- 1 pm
Free Admission
Oxfambooks Poems for 2009 Competition
Closing Date for entries: Tues July 15th 2008
Where is this year going?
It’s been a busy few months getting through all submissions for the year. We received more than 1,000 poems and around 350 stories so there has been a lot of reading going on. We’re just making final selections at the moment. Submissions closed now until next January.
Next up is our summer issue. That will be out in June. We’re also in process of getting our next short story anthology together. We plan to publish that in September… watch this space.
Who’d've thought it?
Our first issue came out on March 6th 1998, and here we are ten years older and wiser… join us on Friday March 7th from 4pm to 6pm in Dublin’s City Hall for our 10th Birthday Party.
The event is part of the inaugural Dublin Book Festival which runs in City Hall from March 7th to 9th. There is a whole host of other readings, discussions and debates. At 3pm on Sunday March 9th Kevin Barry will read alongside Mike McCormack and Geraldine Mills. Admission to all events is free. CLÉ, the Irish Book Publishers’ Association, who are organising the festival will operate a bookshop throughout the weekend.
We hope to begin getting responses out over the next couple of weeks. We received over 400 stories—a fantastic response—and it has taken us this long to read through them all and to give them proper consideration. Thanks to all who submitted.
The Stinging Fly in association with The Irish Times is delighted to announce the return of the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award, Ireland’s biggest short story competition and the world’s richest prize for a single short story. Next year’s award will see €25,000 going to the best short story and five runners-up receiving €1,000. The acclaimed American novelist and short story writer Richard Ford will judge the competition.
The Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award was previously held in 2004 as part of the Bloomsday Centenary celebrations. Over 1100 entries were received with Anne Enright eventually being declared the winner for her short story ‘Honey’. Also featured on the 2004 shortlist were Kevin Barry and Philip Ó Ceallaigh, who have both since won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for their debut story collections. In making the decision to sponsor the award for a second time, Redmond Doran of Davy Byrnes pointed to the huge success of the competition in 2004 and said that he hoped that the 2009 award would ‘seek out and reward writers with a similar level of talent and promise.’
Timeline for 2009 Award:
Open for Entries: October 1st 2008
Deadline for Entries: Monday Feb 2nd 2009
Shortlist: late May/early June 2009
Winner Announced: June 2009
The competition is open to Irish citizens and to residents of the thirty-two counties. There is no word count limit, but entries must consist of a previously unpublished short story written in English. A full set of rules and entry forms will be made available in advance of the competition being open for entries in October. Further details available at www.davybyrnesaward.org
Saturday, Feb 16th 2008
3pm Kevin Barry Reading
Little Catherine Art Gallery and Bookshop – FREE EVENT
9.30pm - The Stinging Fly and Sunset Lounge
Unfringed in association with The Stinging Fly present an evening of literature and Jazz to launch their Spring 2008 edition.
Playing standards, lounge classics and cabaret selections, David Irwin’s Sunset Lounge Trio are a well-established fixture on the Munster jazz scene. The literary aspect of the evening will include readings by three contributors to our spring issue: Majella Cullinane, Michael J. Farrell and Colm Liddy.
BELLTABLE CAFE: 9.30 TIL LATE Tickets €12/10
Alongside our usual 2008 submission call, we are looking for submissions to a special issue of the magazine that will celebrate and explore erotic writing.
Guest editor Sean O’Reilly says he is ’seeking short stories and poems—and anything in between—which explore the excesses of sexual desire as their explicit theme or that simply seek to stimulate sexual arousal for their own ends.’
Submissions for this special issue should be marked for the attention of Sean and posted to PO Box 6016, Dublin 8 to arrive on or before Friday, March 14th 2008.
If submitting work for both our standard issues and this special issue, please clearly mark the work that is intended for the erotic issue.
Submissions for the standard issues will be accepted up until the end of March. See side panel for full set of guidelines.
Arminta Wallace’s review of the new paperback edition of Kevin Barry’s There Are Little Kingdoms in last Saturday’s Irish Times (Dec 15th) was perhaps the perfect way to end what has been a successful and busy year for the Fly.
‘It’s not hard to see why Kevin Barry won the 2007 Rooney Prize. The pieces in this, his debut short story collection, are smart, sassy and – with their references to organic farming, social substance abuse and linguistic confusion – totally now. Not for Barry the romantic smudging of rain on a soft-focus lens: his are tense, edgy slices of a small-town Ireland, where nastiness is never buried too far beneath the surface of things. On the other hand, his remorseless clarity of vision can be hilarious. The situations are so vivid as to be almost cinematic: bored teenagers on the loose in quiet streets; a man who steps off a country bus, unable to remember who he is or how he got there; a stressed-out genie in scruffy Nikes and chinos takes issue with the three wishes of his hapless client. If these 13 stories were chocolates, they’d be the dark, 85-per-cent kind – with chilli centres.’
2008 is sure to be another busy year. Our next issue is due in February, and then we’ll celebrate our tenth anniversary in early March. We’ve received up on 400 stories for our next anthology, and if that isn’t enough reading to be getting on with, our submission period for the magazine (Jan–March) will set that right.
Thanks to all who have contributed to the magazine during 2007, and thanks too to our readers, our subscribers and our patrons.
Happy Christmas one and all!
Deadline for anthology now passed - submissions in January for magazine!
yes, that’s right, we’re going to do it all again…
Last year’s anthology These Are Our Lives featured twenty-two stories and was widely praised upon publication, with The Irish Times calling it ‘a celebration of new voices in fiction, sprinkled, too, with some more established names.’ The Irish Examiner hailed it as ‘a riveting collection’ and Metro declared it ‘a handsomely designed book that is in no way let down by its content.’
The new anthology will attempt to outclass its predecessor in every way.
Submissions to PO Box 6016, Dublin 8 should reach us before Friday, December 14th. Word count less important than making the words count. No e-mail submissions. No more than two stories per writer please. No particular theme.
Depending on submissions, we hope to bring the book out in June next year.
Copies of These Are Our Lives are still available. No home should be without one.
The stories will also be considered for publication in the magazine. Submissions for the magazine will be accepted from January to March. Those of you submitting for the anthology are welcome to submit other stories for consideration for the magazine.
We will try to get responses to anthology submissions out by the end of January.