Aharon Appelfeld wins Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012

The winner of this year's Independent Foreign Fiction Prize was announced last night as Aharon Appelfeld, with his Holocaust novel, Blooms of Darkness (Alma Books); translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green. Appelfeld's novel, which is based … [Read more...]

Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award 2012 longlist

The nominees for this year's Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award have been announced, revealing a record breaking longlist of 77 short story collections from 17 different countries. Despite a €10,000 drop in the overall winner's … [Read more...]

Kevin Barry wins 2012 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award

I said yesterday that if the judging panel were in jovial mood, then Kevin Barry would take this year's Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award Well, it was announced earlier this evening at the Oxford Literary Festival that he did indeed … [Read more...]

Bookshelf of the Week: A Montaigne-esque personal library

The first person I thought of when I saw the subject for this week's Bookshelf of the Week was Michel de Montaigne, the celebrated sixteenth-century French nobleman, who is credited as being the founder of the modern personal essay. If the man were … [Read more...]

If you only read one short story this week…

...then please make sure it's one from the Bloomsbury 'Year of the Short Story' Sampler (provided you haven't read it already of course), created to give a taste of each of the five collections that Bloomsbury are publishing during the first five … [Read more...]

Costa Book Awards get ‘shorted’. A cause for celebration?

So, the headline news at the Costa Book Awards ceremony in London last night may have been the (deserved) victory of Andrew Miller who took the title of Costa Book of the Year with his novel Pure (Sceptre), but the bigger news for me - and every … [Read more...]

Reading the short story: my most valuable tip

I used to adhere to a strict rule when reading short fiction - never read more than one or two stories in a single day. This was a rule I stuck doggedly to, because I felt that reading any more than this would cause everything to meld in the mind; … [Read more...]

Rob Reports: The Story Hour event at West Port Book Festival 2011

Book events with authors normally follow the same old routine - the author's introduced, the author reads, the author answers questions - but at the West Port Book Festival on Sunday and The Short Story Hour, featuring David Gaffney and Hannah … [Read more...]

Rob Reports: Robert Shearman at West Port Book Festival 2011

The Edinburgh Book Festival may be the biggest literary event of the year in Scotland's capital, but don't think for one minute that outside of August Edinburgh is bereft of any decent book events. There's plenty going on all year round (it is a … [Read more...]

Cover Love: Penguin Ink collection

If people can have literary tattoos then why can't literature have people tattoos? My 'Cover Love' feature returns to RobAroundBooks this month, with one of the finest looking set of books to have graced the bookshop bookshelves in recent months. … [Read more...]