Bernie McGill is the winner of The Edge Hill Short Story Prize
Congratulations to Bernie McGill who is this year’s winner of The Edge Hill Short Story Prize with her short story collection This Train is For, published by No Alibis Press.
Now in its 17th year, The Edge Hill Prize is the only annual UK-based award to recognise excellence in a single-author short story collection, with a first prize of £10,000.
Bernie McGill is the author of two novels, The Butterfly Cabinet and The Watch House, and two collections of short stories, Sleepwalkers and the Edge Hill prize-winner This Train is For (No Alibis Press).
“No Alibis is an independent press that may be small in size but is big in heart,” said McGill on her achievement. “David Torrans and Emma Warnock and the team there have been fully behind this book from the start, from before the time that it came together as a collection. In This Train is For they took a leap of faith. I’m enormously thrilled and proud for all of us that it paid off.”
Naomi Booth was the winner of the £1,000 Reader’s Choice Award for her collection Animals at Night (Dead Ink Books).
The judges for this year’s prize were the winner of last year’s award Saba Sams, Lucy Luck, agent at C&W Agency, and short story writer and Edge Hill creative writing lecturer Andrea Ashworth.
Ten collections made the longlist, which included Love in the Time of Chaos, by Rosemary Jenkinson (Arlen House). Previous winners include Sarah Hall, David Szalay, Tessa Hadley and Kevin Barry.
Bernie McGill’s award-winning stories have been widely praised for their emotional depth and lyrical language.
She is a writer of profound sensitivity and observation whose masterful deployment of linguistic precision and economy enables her to plumb the depths of human experience while neatly avoiding sentimentalism.
This new collection, the first since 2013, contains unpublished stories along with a number of previously published stories contained within award winning anthologies.
You can listen to Bernie McGill on Burning Books, where she talks about Aesop’s Fables, the Irish short story, Lincoln in the Bardo, and lots more—along with reading an excerpt from the winning collection, This Train is For.
