Barry becomes first writer to win Edge Hill Prize twice

Kevin Barry has won the Edge Hill Prize for the second time with That Old Country Music (Canongate), making him the first writer to do so in the award’s 15-year history. 

The Irish writer, who also won the £10,000 prize in 2013, said: “It feels like an especially unlikely turn of luck to win the prize a second time. There were brilliant story writers on both the shortlist and longlist so I’m very grateful to the judges.” 

He added: “I think the short story is a sacred form. There’s nothing more intense for the reader than to be in the hands of a great story and there’s nothing more difficult for a writer to get right.” 

The Edge Hill Prize, founded in 2006, is the only annually presented award for a published, single-authored collection of short stories in the UK and Ireland. 

Prize organiser Billy Cowan, a senior lecturer in creative writing, said the win “attests to the quality of Barry’s sublime work”. 

“What we love about his writing is that he makes it seem so easy; the lyrical ebb and flow of his sentences are deceptively simple, but beautiful.” 

Newcomer Alice Ash won the £1,000 Reader’s Choice Award, chosen by staff and students at Edge Hill University, for Paradise Block (Serpent’s Tail/Profile). 

She said she was “honoured, elated and completely shocked” to have won the prize. “Having published Paradise Block into the depths of the pandemic, I haven’t had a huge amount of engagement with readers and I sometimes felt like maybe I’d dreamt the whole thing. 

“Hearing that I’d won the prize made the whole experience come alive for me—it has been incredibly fulfilling and I’m so grateful to the readers for selecting my book. 

“As the Edge Hill Prize was the most prestigious short story prize I’d ever heard of, I wanted to nervously throw my hat in and I’m so glad I did because this has been a very happy and nourishing experience for me.” 

Cowan commended Ash’s “dark, compelling imagination”, adding: “This is a writer to look out for and I’m sure her next work will be very special indeed.” 

The third winner was Kashyap Raja, a Creative Writing Masters student at Edge Hill, who won the MA Prize for Epiphany. 

Cowan added: “At the beginning of your career a prize like the MA Prize can help young writers gain their first step in publishing, so Kashyap will hopefully go now from strength to strength.”