Davy Byrnes Stories

The six prize-winning stories from the 2009 Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award as selected by Richard Ford: `Foster ' by Claire Keegan, `Living in Unknown' by Mary Leland, `This Isn't Heaven' by Molly McCloskey, `The Road Wife' by Eoin McNamee, `Storm Glass' by Kathleen Murray, and `The Rescue' by Susan Stairs. The Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award is sponsored by Davy Byrnes of Dublin. It is Ireland's biggest competition for a single short story and it aims to honor the great tradition of short story writing in Ireland and to encourage and reward excellence among current practitioners of the form. `To my American ear, narrators and characters in these stories seemed to enjoy expressing themselves, seemed to like the feel of words in their virtual mouths, seemed to think that important life was largely lived in language -in what we say to each other, about each other, remember of each other, in how we love, detest, ignore, demean and relish.'-Richard Ford