Edna O'Brien wins the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award

An Irish writer has finally won Ireland's major international short story competition. It took no less than the magisterial talent of Edna O'Brien, the most literary of Irish writers, to become the first Irish winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story award. Her collection Saints and Sinners held off the challenge of Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. It is an interesting result. Yiyun Li's first book, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, had not only won the inaugural Frank O'Connor award in 2005, it immediately established the Beijing-born, US-based writer as a major voice who wrote an outstanding first novel The Vagrants