Flash Fiction

JUDGING ALLINGHAM FLASH

A little reminder that I am judging the Allingham Flash Comp this year, and winners will be published in a special issue of the e-journal I edit, Splonk. See their Press Release below.

2024 Allingham Flash Fiction Competition

Entries in the 2024 Allingham Flash Fiction Competition will be judged by Nuala O’Connor, acclaimed author of SEABORNE and editor of the e-journal Splonk. Deadline for entries is 29 September.

NORA by Nuala O’Connor was chosen as Dublin’s One City One Book novel in 2022 and was selected as was a Top 10 historical novel by the New York Times. Her sixth novel SEABORNE about Irish-born pirate Anne Bonny has been published in April 2024 by New Island. Nuala O’Connor won Irish Short Story of the Year at the 2022 Irish Book Awards, and she serves as editor of the flash e-journal Splonk. She lives and writes in Galway. www.nualaoconnor.com.

First-, Second- and Third-Place winners of the Poetry and Flash Fiction awards will read their winning entries at the Literary Lunch at noon on Saturday, 9 November during the 2024 Allingham Festival. In addition to the First-Place €300 cash award, winning entries in the 2024 Flash Fiction Competition will also be published in Splonk https://splonk.ie/.

The 2024 Allingham Festival will run from 6-10 November in Ballyshannon, Co Donegal. Highlights of the Festival will include a keynote speech on Artificial Intelligence by RTE broadcaster Richard Curran, and a concert by delta-blues prodigy Muireann Bradley. Details of the Festival, including rules and entry forms for the Poetry and Flash Fiction Competitions, are posted on-line at www.allinghamfestival.com.

Birdie – Irish Times Review

I’m very pleased with this review of my historical flash fiction chapbook, Birdie, in today’s Irish Times. Thanks to Ruth McKee.

Birdie
By Nuala O’Connor
Arlen House, €10.00 Sat, Dec 5, 2020, 06:00


As you would expect from O’Connor, this collection of flash fiction is a menagerie of exquisite language. The stories transport us to moments in time, and to no-time, as the author paints fragments of history that are palpable with characters who come alive in a brushstroke. Artists and sitters are here as are servants, soldiers, mothers and sisters in stories of losing, longing, and home. Historical fiction can sometimes be clogged with research – not so in these stories which are glances, swift and sensory, with grace-notes of details to let us recognise where we are. Here is the “crookedness of nature,” the lure and lore of home but also the emigrant, the lost lover, the perished child. This collection takes us from the olagón to the “shale-and-ripple of a shell”: a pearl. – Ruth McKee

BIRDIE – where to buy

Signing copies of birdie in Kennys of Galway

I was awarded a COVID-19 Crisis Response Award for Literature, from the Arts Council of Ireland, to write and compile birdie, a collection of 16 historical and out-of-time flash and micro fictions.

You can buy a digital copy of birdie here at Draft2Digital or a kindle edition here. It costs €5.99 / US$5.99 / £4.99.

Arlen House has produced a limited, hard-copy edition of birdie which can be bought from Kennys, Galway (Kennys now has signed copies!); Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop Galway; Hodges Figgis; The Reading Room in Leitrim; Forever Amber in Meath; Waterstones Cork; Dubrays; and O’Mahonys. Your local shop will order.

Reviewers: please contact Alan Hayes at Arlen House.

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More about birdie:

Love is the central force in birdie, a collection of sixteen historical and out-of-time flash fictions that sing with the voices of women loving and losing and learning. The characters here find strength, despite the sorrows of death and deceit: a ghost-child returns to Massachusetts to comfort her grieving mother; the daughter of a Spanish orange tycoon regrets her mother’s terrible choices; an English maid longs for, but can’t be with, her mistress’s son.

Birdie contains O’Connor’s signature ekphrastic work, drawing on artists as diverse as Matisse, da Vinci, and American painter Edwin Romanzo Elmer. The natural world looms large too: sheep and foxes roam these pages, while seawater washes through them.

Described by the Toronto Star as a writer of ‘magical imagination’ and by the Washington Post as ‘soaring’, O’Connor’s collection of historical flash will delight her readers, old and new.