Saturday, 17th October

Ó Faoláin Prize Reading

3.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5

The Seán Ó Faoláin International Short Story Prize is awarded to the best single story entered in competition from anywhere in the world. The first prize is €2,000, a featured reading at the Cork International Short Story Festival (with four-night hotel stay and full board) and publication in Southword. This occasion is an opportunity to hear the winning story as chosen by this year’s judge Louise Hegarty. Details of the winner, not yet announced, will be posted here soon. Prizewinning and shortlisted stories from this competition will be published in Southword 52 (summer 2027).

Lucy Caldwell & Guy Ware

4.30pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5

Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast and is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and four collections of short stories: Multitudes, Intimacies, Openings, and most recently, Devotions. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, she was the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories in 2019. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021 for ‘All the People Were Mean and Bad’. Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Walter Scott Prize and the 2022 E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. She runs a popular online masterclass on the short story for the Faber Academy.

Buy Devotions and visit the author's website.

“Devotions speaks to a fifth dimension – that of a collective human spirit, an emotional continuum. This collection is exhilarating, devastating, comforting, essential.” — Claire Kilroy

Guy Ware is a novelist and short-story writer based in London. His first collection, You Have 24 Hours to Love Us, was longlisted for the 2012 Edge Hill and Frank O’Connor International awards. He won the London Short Story Prize in 2018. Guy is also the author of five novels, including The Fat of Fed Beasts (2015) – a Guardian ‘Pick of the Year’, and Our Island Story (2024) – a black comedy about our inability to face the climate catastrophe we’ve brought upon ourselves. His latest story collection, A Day Like Any Other, was published in June by Salt.

Buy A Day Like Any Other and visit the author's Linktree.

“A Day Like Any Other explores natural, assisted, promised and unexpected death with compassion, wit and a steady gaze. It is the perfect collection for anyone who’s going to die one day.” — Houman Barekat

(Moderator) Patrick Holloway is a prize-winning writer of fiction and poetry. His debut novel, The Language of Remembering, was published in 2025, his second forthcoming in 2027 with Bonnier Books. He is a frequent writer and critic for The Irish Times and The Irish Examiner. He is the 2026 Writer in Residence at Maynooth University.

Billy O’Callaghan & Simon Van Booy

7.30pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5

Billy O’Callaghan, from Cork, is the author of four novels and four short story collections, including My Coney Island Baby, The Boatman and Other Stories, Life Sentences and The Paper Man. Winner of the Irish Book Award and shortlisted for the COSTA Short Story Prize and the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award among other honours, his work has been translated into nineteen languages. Recent short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Agni, Fiction, the Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Ploughshares, South Carolina Review, The Stinging Fly, the Threepenny Review and Winter Papers.

Buy The Boatman and Other Stories and visit the author's website.

“[Billy O’Callaghan] makes epics out of the unspoken, the barely said, the half-hinted at, the wordless nod … This is O’Callaghan’s quest, to reveal who his characters really are.” — Anne Cunningham

Simon Van Booy is the bestselling author of 16 books for adults and children, including Sipsworth, The Illusion of Separateness, and Love Begins in Winter, which won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He is the anthologist of three volumes of philosophy, and has written for the New York Times, the Financial Times, and the Washington Post. Raised in rural North Wales, Simon currently lives in New York, where he is also a private book editor. In his spare time, Simon volunteers as an EMS lieutenant. His other joys include spending time with his wife and daughter, model trains, longcase clocks, and early music.

Buy The Sadness Of Beautiful Things: Stories and visit the author's website.

“Van Booy works an unusual trick of transubstantiation. In moments, in glances, in tiny flutterings of description … He finds the expressions of sweetness or light in darkness, captures the precise weight of exhaustion in joy when it comes to those who have learned how rare and precious happiness can be.” — Jason Sheehan

(Moderator) Laura Cassidy is a writer from Co. Kildare, living in Cork city. She is a co-founder and contributing editor of Banshee and reviews books for The Irish Examiner. Laura is the recipient of the 2025 Molly Keane Creative Writing Award along with several awards from the Arts Council.

Dermot Bolger & Liz McManus

9.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5

Dermot Bolger is an Irish poet, novelist, playwright and short story writer. His fifteen novels include The Journey Home, An Ark of Light, The Lonely Sea and Sky and Hide Away. His recent plays include Last Orders at the Dockside and an adaptation of Ulysses, both staged by the Abbey Theatre. His eleventh poetry collection, Other People’s Lives, was published in 2024. His most recent collection of short stories, Imperfect Beings, was published this year. As a teenage factory hand, he founded Raven Arts Press and in 1992 he co-founded New Island publishers.

Buy Imperfect Beings and visit the author's website.

“Bolger is to contemporary Dublin what Dickens was to Victorian London: archivist, reporter, sometimes infuriated lover. Certainly, no understanding of Ireland’s capital at the close of the twentieth century is complete without an acquaintance with his magnificent writing.” — Joseph O’Connor

Liz McManus is a writer and former politician. Born in Montreal, Canada, she grew up in France, Holland, and Ireland and was a columnist with The Sunday Tribune for seven years. Her literary awards include Listowel (short story award), Irish Pen (short story award), and a Hennessy Literary Award. Her short story collection Tiny Bruises is out this year from Arlen House. Her novels are Acts of Subversion (Poolbeg), shortlisted for the Aer Lingus / Irish Times award; A Shadow in the Yard (Ward River Press) and When Things Come to Light (Arlen House). She is a former co-chair of Irish PEN / Pen na hÉireann.

Buy Tiny Bruises.

“The depth and nuance of the individual characters’ stories in Tiny Bruises … give pause to a study of our history’s broad strokes, forcing a realisation that the layers of complexity, contradiction, self-deceit and occlusion that characterised our progress as a young nation are still very much extant and as hard to fathom. McManus makes a remarkable and timely contribution to our understanding of ourselves.” — Donal Ryan

(Moderator) Patrick Holloway is a prize-winning writer of fiction and poetry. His debut novel, The Language of Remembering, was published in 2025, his second forthcoming in 2027 with Bonnier Books. He is a frequent writer and critic for The Irish Times and The Irish Examiner. He is the 2026 Writer in Residence at Maynooth University.

Image credits: Lucy Caldwell photographed by Neil Hainsworth, Liz McManus photographed by Andres Poveda