Short and Sweet

Auckland writer Charlotte Grimshaw has been nominated for the world’s richest prize for collected short stories, the £35,000 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Grimshaw joins 32 authors on the Irish event’s  longlist, including heavyweights Alice Munro and David Malouf. She describes Opportunity, her first ever collection, as “not just a collection of short stories that I’ve thrown together – all the stories are interconnected. The characters recur and reappear and it has an extra layer in a way because one of the characters is the author of all the stories.” Grimshaw, 40, won last year’s Katherine Mansfield Award for short fiction and is the author of three acclaimed novels: Provocation, Guilt and Foreign City. The Frank O’Connor shortlist will be announced in July, and the winner declared at Cork’s Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival in September.