Short Story Competition 2026

SHORT STORY COMPETITION 2026

Sponsored by Bridge St and Mayo Books Press

Judge: Colin Barrett

• First prize: €500

• Second prize: €300

Judge’s remarks:

Last week I went to the doctor. My tip of my ring finger was red and swollen. It turns out it was infected, and the GP prescribed me a course of antibiotics. He asked me what I did. I said I write. He said what do you write? I said books – fiction, novels, stories. He said do you make a living at that. I said, just about. Anyway, he asked in case I did something that required physical labour, that would require regular use of my hands. He advised resting the hand and suggested that if I wanted to keep working I could just use AI, and told me about a transcription program he uses. He talks into it and it transcribes what he says and then he goes through it and edits it and so on. He said he’s found it a much more efficient way to write.

Without really thinking about it, I rather defensively responded that I needed my hands to write. Writing is tactile for me I told him. I write with my hands I said, not my head.

Which is overstating the case somewhat- I do use my head to write- but it is still, I think, an observation that is more right than wrong. At least for me.

I realize some such distinction was in operation in my thoughts – in my body- as I made my way through the entries in this year’s Short Story competition.

So many of this year’s stories deal with the body, the physical world and its processes. The body in extremis, subject to all manners of stresses and adversities. The bodies of the elderly, of the middle aged, the bodies of teenagers and the bodies of children, the bodies of nonhuman creatures. The body when it is gone, and what is left in its place.

Technology crops up too in many of these stories, in all its complexity and terrible promise. The aforementioned AI, and the internet, screens and recording devices. We live in an age- we have long lived in an age, in which our relations to each other, to the world, and even to our own selves- is inextricably mediated by technology.

Technology. From the ancient Greek Techne, which refers to an art, skill or craft, or a method and system of making or doing. The Greek techne is itself a derivation of Proto-Indo-European root teks- which means to weave or fabricate.

Which brings us back to my exchange with the doctor, and indeed my prolonged exchange with these wonderful stories I read over this summer. If writing, as the doctor in my anecdote sees it, is primarily a product of the mind, and I made the point that writing is at least as much product of the body, these stories remind me that writing is a product of both of these things – which are really one thing- and also something else.

An art, a skill, a craft. A method and system of making and doing. A weaving, a fabrication.

In 2026 this is as useful a definition of writing as I have. There were just over a hundred entries in this year’s competition. I had to select a winner, runner up and a couple of highly commended pieces. But every story I read gave me the gift of a presence, of someone, someone I have never met and probably never will, speaking to me. Stories are a technology, a showing forth of the inalienably human. Thank you to everyone who entered this year’s competition for reminding me of that.

WINNER: The Thinking Machine by Mary Heeran White from Co. Clare

The Thinking Machine is a fresh, original and thoughtful story featuring a widower on a remote west of Ireland village who confesses to his drinking buddies he’s recently began using Chatgpt. I won’t say anything more concerning the plot, for part of the great pleasure in this story is watching the conceit unfold. This is a compellingly written, frequently funny and very human story that remains light on its feet even as it confronts the darkest of material. It’s a story that, like all great stories I think, passes no judgement on its characters or their decisions, it simply depicts them, tenderly and unsentimentally, in all their mysterious resilience.

RUNNER-UP: The Ministry of Presence by John Lane from Co. Sligo

This story has the compression, playfulness and eeriness of a poem. A whole life is summed up in what reads as a handful of cryptic, brilliant, pleasurably puzzling lines. Like the fox at the edge of the story, this story is an elusive but abiding presence

SHORTLISTED:

Capturing C by Adrian White from Galway

Captivating C is as much an incantation, a coursing rush of feeling, as it is a story. Linguistically playful and relentlessly, restlessly innovative.

Another Way of Saying Hello by Gerard Reidy from Co. Mayo

This pleasantly ambling, shaggy dog tale of a young Russian pianist visiting the west of Ireland to perform in the Ballina music festival and getting tangled up in the lives of a couple of eccentric local men is hardbitten, surreal and generous.

Vanishing Point by Brian Kirk from Dublin

Vanishing Point is an ambitious, quietly steely story about a woman in a failing marriage returning home to Ireland with her family in order to care for her senile stepfather. This is a story that has layers, that possesses the confidence to leave certain things unsaid, that always has more going on than meets the eye and that subtly and successfully meets -even as it upends- the readers expectations.

Judge: Colin Barrett

Colin Barrett is the author of the short story collections Young Skins (2013), Homesickness (2022) and the novel Wild Houses (2024). In the year of its publication, Young Skins was the winner of the Guardian First Book Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize and the Rooney Prize for Literature. Homesickness was a 2022 Irish Times and New Yorker Book of the Year, and included in the 2022 New York Times 100 notable books of the year.  His novel Wild Houses was longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize and won the Nero Debut Fiction Prize. His short fiction has appeared regularly in The Stinging Fly, Harpers and The New Yorker, among many other journals and magazines.

Colin was one of the Observer New Review’s 10 Best New Novelists of the Year 2024, is a former ‘5 under 35’ National Book Award Winner in the United States, and was a 2018-20 Rolex Protégé in Literature for the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Arts Program, mentored by Colm Tóibín. He is the current Writer in Residence at DCU.