Louise Kennedy on how she chose this year’s Moth Short Story Prize winner

“Reading the entries reminded me of how delicate and marvellous a thing a good short story is,” said this year’s Moth Short Story Prize judge, Louise Kennedy, whose award-winning novel Trespasses is to be adapted to screen by Channel 4 this autumn. “No other form can carry such emotional heft in so few words.”
Kennedy chose reasons to end us (an aeriel view) by New Zealand author Tracey Slaughter as her first prize winner because “the narrator’s voice in this exceptional work is so insistent, so intense, reading it literally took my breath away. Formally this is a wonder, comprising thirty ‘reasons’. Some are stinging, paragraph-length vignettes, and the briefest are often the most devastating. There is extraordinary control here, but what really sets this short story apart is timing; details ‒ startling in their originality ‒ explode like little bombs and revelations land at precisely the right moment. What a story. A truly worthy winner.”
Slaughter, a poet, essayist and fiction writer from Aotearoa, is no stranger to The Moth Short Story Prize, as her story Postcards are a Thing of the Past was awarded second prize by the 2018 judge, Kevin Barry. Her latest works are the poetry collection The Girls in the Red House are Singing and the fiction collection Devil’s Trumpet. Her writing has received numerous awards, including the Calibre Essay Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize, the Fish Short Story Prize and the Bridport Prize. She lives in Kirikiriroa, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Waikato and edits the journals Mayhem and Poetry Aotearoa.
Slaughter will be awarded €3,000 and her story is published today as part of the summer fiction series in The Irish Times.
June Caldwell’s story, Catastrophic, which has been awarded second prize, grabbed Kennedy with its playful, punny title and frank opening ‒ “Our cat has gone missing …” ‒ and held her by the throat to the end. “The story isn’t really about the cat, of course,” Kennedy says, “but the exhausting, chaotic relationship the narrator was in when the animal came into her life. The writing has tremendous verve, the imagery surprises, and I love the original and demotic use of language, rich with Dorothy Parker level quips. The final communications with the ex are desperately sad, yet lifted by dark humour, acceptance, and the spectre of the poor wise cat. Lovely stuff.”
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Caldwell, who lives in Dublin, is the author of acclaimed short story collection Room Little Darker, and her debut novel Little Town Moone is forthcoming from John Murray. Her essays and short stories have been published in numerous anthologies and journals. In 2020 she curated an exhibition entitled Somebody on the legacy of Nuala O’Faolain at the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLi). She is the recipient of two Arts Council bursaries for literature and facilitates workshops on the short story form at the Irish Writers Centre. She was a prizewinner of The Moth Short Story Prize in 2014 (judged by Mike McCormack) and has been shortlisted for many others, including Short Story of the Year at the Irish Book Awards.
Caldwell will spend a week at the luxury writing retreat, Circle of Misse, in France.
Third prize goes to Gertrude’s Favourite Pfeffernüsse by the American author Melanie McGee Bianchi. “This is an artfully drawn portrait of someone who is rather less than they thought they would be,” says Kennedy. “A character like Vark could be a figure of fun, but the writer lets him move through the world with dignity and a heart-rending acceptance of the constrictions that have left him stuck. The descriptors here are both fresh and familiar, giving this short story almost filmic clarity. His tenderness towards his daughter has a quiet desperation, making the final blow hit hard. Poignant, funny and emotionally astute.”
McGee Bianchi is a journalist and short-story writer from the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina. She edits two regional magazines, Asheville Made and Carolina Home + Garden. Stories collected in her book The Ballad of Cherrystoke first appeared in literary magazines including The Moth, The Mississippi Review and Chattahoochee Review. Melanie writes a lot about traditional Appalachian music; her article about eighth-generation a capella ballad singers from Madison County, North Carolina, was published last winter in Oxford American magazine. She lives with her husband, teenage son, identical twin sister and a cat named Goose. For her story, she will be awarded €1,000.
For more information about upcoming literary prizes, including The Moth Nature Writing Prize (judged by Cal Flyn) and The Moth Poetry Prize (judged by Fiona Benson), see themothmagazine.com