Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.
Alison Louise Kennedy is a Scots writer, academic and stand-up comedian. She writes novels, short stories and non-fiction, and is known for her dark tone and her blending of realism and fantasy. She contributes columns and reviews to European newspapers.
Lorrie Moore is an American writer, critic, and essayist. She is best known for her short stories, some of which have won major awards. Since 1984, she has also taught creative writing.
Heather O'Neill is a Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer, screenwriter and journalist, who published her debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, in 2006. The novel was subsequently selected for the 2007 edition of Canada Reads, where it was championed by singer-songwriter John K. Samson. Lullabies won the competition. The book also won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for eight other major awards, including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Governor General's Award and was longlisted for International Dublin Literary Award.
Philip Ó Ceallaigh is an Irish short story writer and translator who lives in Bucharest.
The Stinging Fly is a literary magazine published in Ireland, featuring short stories, essays, and poetry. It publishes two issues each year. In 2005, The Stinging Fly moved into book publishing with the establishment of The Stinging Fly Press. The magazine has been described as "something of a revelation in Irish literature" by The New York Times.
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born writer and professor in the United States. Her short stories and novels have won several awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award and Guardian First Book Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, the 2020 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for Where Reasons End, and the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose. Her short story collection Wednesday's Child was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary magazine A Public Space.
Wena Poon is a lawyer and novelist based in the United States. She writes English-language fiction. Her work has been seen by academics in the UK, US and Singapore as representative of the transnationalism of her generation.
Charlotte Grimshaw is a New Zealand novelist, short-story writer, columnist and former lawyer. She has written both fiction and non-fiction, often drawing on her legal experience. Her short stories and longer works often have interlinked themes and characters, and feature psychological and family dramas.
The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award—named in honour of Frank O'Connor, who devoted much of his work to the form—was an international literary award presented for the best short story collection. It was presented between 2005 and 2015. The prize amount, €25,000 as of 2012, is one of the richest short-story collection prizes in the world. Each year, roughly sixty books were longlisted, with either four or six books shortlisted, the ultimate decision made by three judges.
Jahnavi Barua is an Indian author from Assam. She is the author of 'Next Door', a critically acclaimed collection of short stories set in Assam with insurgency as the background. Barua lives in Bangalore, and obtained her MBBS at Gauhati Medical College but does not practice medicine. She studied creative writing in the United Kingdom.
Manuel Muñoz is an American novelist, short story writer, and professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.
Dina Zaman is a Kuala Lumpur-based writer and researcher. She is a co-founder of IMAN Research, a think tank focusing on socio-political and security matters, and a founding member of the Southeast Asian Women Peacebuilders.
Meghna Pant is an Indian author, journalist and speaker. She has won a variety of awards for her contribution to literature, gender issues and journalism. In 2012, she won the Muse India National Literary Awards Young Writer Award for her debut novel One-and-a-Half Wife. Her collection of short stories, Happy Birthday and Other Stories was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Award.
Laura van den Berg is an American fiction writer. She is the author of five works of fiction. Her first two collections of short stories were each shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, in 2010 and 2014. In 2021, she was awarded the Strauss Livings Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Ritu Lalit is an Indian novelist, short story writer, and blogger based in Faridabad, India, noted for writing fiction and mostly of the fantasy and thriller genre. She is author of five novels, A Bowlful of Butterflies, a coming of age story about three fast friends in school, Hilawi, a fantasy thriller, and Chakra, Chronicles of the Witch Way, a fantasy adventure, Wrong for the Right Reasons, a story about a young divorcee bringing up her children and a murder mystery, and His Father's Mistress.
Kirsty Logan is a Scottish writer.
Ellen J. Levy is an American writer and academic who was an associate professor of English at Colorado State University before retiring from this role. Her collection of short stories, Love, In Theory, was published in 2012, and her first novel, The Cape Doctor, in 2021 to positive reviews.
The Vagrants is the first novel by Yiyun Li. It was published in 2009, following her award-winning 2005 short story collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.
