British author Simon Van Booy has won the world's richest short story prize, the Frank O'Connor award, for a collection which focuses on the different faces of love.
Van Booy's Love Begins in Winter beat five other short story collections, including the US author Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned and Zimbabwean Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly, to win the €35,000 (£30,000) prize. Some big literary names, including Kazuo Ishiguro, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ali Smith and James Lasdun, had failed to make even the shortlist for this year's award.
Speaking at the awards ceremony in Cork last night, Van Booy said he was both surprised and "very, very grateful" to have won. "I was very nervous coming to Cork for the Frank O'Connor festival," he said, according to the Irish Examiner. "But I stopped being nervous when I read the other shortlisted books. I was shocked by the quality of the work, and I knew I had no hope of winning."
Van Booy, already this morning on a plane back to New York, where he now lives and teaches, was born in London and grew up in rural Wales and Oxford. The 34-year-old is the author of one previous short story collection, The Secret Lives of People in Love. His debut novel, along with a series of non-fiction philosophy titles, will be published next year.
Love Begins in Winter is a collection of five stories about characters "on the verge of giving up". The title story tells of a world-famous cellist who has withdrawn from society but who falls for a shop owner who is obsessed with birds (read an extract).
"Love is one of his themes – the power of love to overcome tragedy, the longing for it, what it means, how it can transcend generations," said Simon Petherick, Van Booy's publisher at Beautiful Books. "His tone and use of language is so unusual, so delicate. He is a wonderful observer – like Somerset Maugham he is able to go into a room and identify exactly what's happening. He has the ability with incredible precision to paint beautiful pictures. There's an elegiac, wistful quality to his writing. He is a romantic."
Previous winners of the Frank O'Connor short story award include Haruki Murakami and Jhumpa Lahiri.
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