Four Irish on £30,000 Sunday Times Short Story Award longlist

Four Irish authors have made the 14-strong longlist for the 2017 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, which includes nine women, seven American writers and only two British authors. At £30,000 for the winner, this is the world's richest and most prestigious prize for an English-language single short story and regularly attracts some of the finest literary talent from around the world.

The longlisted Irish writers are Lisa McInerney, who won the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction and the Desmond Elliott Prize for The Glorious Heresies; Christine Dwyer Hickey, who has twice won the Listowel Writers’ Week short story competition and the Penguin/Observer short story competition in 1993; Ethel Rohan, winner of the Bryan MacMahon Short Story Award in 2013 and whose debut novel The Weight of Him is due out here in June; and Sally Rooney, whose debut novel, Conversations with Friends, will also be published in June.

This year’s judges are authors Anne Enright, Mark Lawson, Neel Mukherjee, Rose Tremain and Andrew Holgate, literary editor of the Sunday Times. The shortlist is revealed on March 19th and the winner on April 27th. Kevin Barry won the prize in 2012.

Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival has announced the shortlist for the 2017 Shine/Strong Award, presented to the author of the best first collection of poems published in English or Irish by an Irish poet in the previous year. The winner will be announced on March 26th at 2pm when all shortlisted poets will read from their collections. The contenders are Stephanie Conn (The Woman on the Other Side, Doire Press); Adam Crothers (Several Deer, Carcanet Press); and Simon Lewis (Jewtown, Doire Press).

This year's Trinity College Dublin Booksale will take place from February 21st-23rd in the Exam Hall in Trinity's Front Square. This very popular annual event features tens of thousands of books for sale on every subject "from fiction to finance and science to soliloquies". Prices are always much lower than similar book fairs. Admission is €3 on Tuesday (12-7.30pm) and free on Wednesday (10am-6pm) and Thursday (10am-2pm, when everything is half price). All funds raised go to buying research materials for the college libraries.

Limerick Literary Festival in honour of Kate O'Brien takes place from February 24th-26th. It will officially be opened on February 24th at 6pm in Limerick City Gallery of Art by journalist Olivia O'Leary. Highlights include Cecelia Ahern in conversation with fellow novelist Donal Ryan; a "vinyl and wine" session on Oscar Wilde and Morrissey hosted by UL Professor and author Eoin Devereux; the presentation of the Kate O'Brien Award to best novel/short story collection by a debut Irish female writer; and other events featuring Martin Dyer, Doireann Ní Ghriofa, Mary Lawson, Thomas Packenham, Mike McCormack, Francesca Melandri, Roisin Meaney, Bill Whelan and Liz Nolan.

On Saturday March 11th, at 3.30pm, 90 women writers from all over Ireland will participate in a mass reading on the steps of Dublin's Garden of Remembrance, creating a soundscape of women writers' voices in celebration of International Women's Day, part of a collaboration between the Irish Writers Centre and Women Aloud Northern Ireland. Beginning at 11am, the day-long event will be an all-island literary celebration of women's writing and an opportunity to hear extracts from women writers. With panel discussions and information sessions, the event aims to cement the relationships between women writers across genres and across Ireland.