Kevin Barry

Short Story Writing - Shortlisted 2011

An Irish short story writer, Barry was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2007, as well as being shortlisted for a number of other prestigious awards. His short stories have appeared in the New Yorker Magazine and the Irish Times, while See The Tree, How Big It’s Grown is to be published in the Best European Fiction 2011 anthology. He will also be the youngest writer to appear in the awaited Granta Book of the Irish Short Story.

Barry’s technique is aurally based, finding the initial spark for many of his stories from something overheard – a haphazard piece of speech, or an innocuous phrase that lingers in his mind until he “writes it away”. He believes the short story to be the highest prose form and has found the work of other writers who “worked from the ear” very inspiring. Other significant influences on the atmosphere of his writing are film, television, drama, graphic novels and “a whole iPod’s worth of music that daily drives and colours my practice”.

While the short story is Barry’s preferred form, he has also successfully applied his talents to writing for stage and screen and his novel, City of Bohane is to be published by Jonathan Cape in 2011.