Billy O'Callaghan

Billy O'Callaghan was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1974, and is the author of three short story collections: ‘In Exile’ (2008) and ‘In Too Deep’ (2009), both published by Mercier Press, and 'The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind' (2013) published by New Island Books, which was honoured with the 2013 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award. He has also compiled a non-fiction book, entitled: 'Learning from the Greats: Lessons on Writing, from the Great Writers', which was published, in April 2014, by Cork City Libraries as part of their Occasional Series. His first novel, 'The Dead House', will be published by Brandon Books, an imprint of O'Brien Press, in the spring of 2017.Over the past decade and a half, some ninety of his short stories have appeared in literary journals and magazines around the world, including:Absinthe: New European Writing, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the Bellevue Literary Review, Bliza, Confrontation, the Fiddlehead, the Forge Magazine, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Kenyon Review, the Kyoto Journal, the Linnet's Wings, London Magazine, the Los Angeles Review, Narrative, Penny Dreadful, Per Contra, the Southeast Review, Southword, Versal, and Yuan Yang: a Journal of Hong Kong and International Writing. New work is forthcoming in Salamander, the Emerson Review and Valparaiso Fiction Review.His work has received and been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Irish Book Award, the George A. Birmingham Short Story Award, the Sean O'Faolain Short Story Award, the Faulkner/Wisdom Award, the Glimmer Train Open Fiction Award, and the Molly Keane Creative Writing Award, as well as Bursaries for literature from the Arts Council of Ireland and the Cork County Council. He has also been shortlisted four times for the RTE Radio 1 P.J. O'Connor Drama Award and is currently a finalist for the 2015 storySouth Million Writers Award.Stories have also been translated into Polish, Dutch, Japanese and Turkish, and broadcast on RTE Radio One's The Book On One, Sunday Miscellany and the Francis McManus Awards series. In 2014, his short story, 'Down By The River' was selected, as Ireland's sole representative, for UNESCO's ongoing Cities of Literature project (Reykjavik).