Frank O’Connor award won by 'truly original' stories of Carys Davies

The Welsh author Carys Davies has won the Frank O’Connor international short story award for her second collection, The Redemption of Galen Pike.

The €25,000 (£18,000) prize, the world’s most lucrative for a single collection of short stories, has been won in the past by some of the genre’s biggest names, including Haruki Murakami and Edna O’Brien. Davies, who now lives in Lancaster, beat writers including the American authors Karen E Bender and Tony Earley, and the British writer Kirsty Gunn, to win this year’s prize.

Her collection, The Redemption of Galen Pike, is published by the small UK independent press Salt. Its subjects span the world, with stories set everywhere from a remote Australian settlement, where a young wife has a secret, to a Colorado jail, where a Quaker woman meets a condemned man in his final hours in the title story.

“Galen Pike’s crime revolted Patience more than she could say, and on her way to the jailhouse to meet him for the first time, she told herself she wouldn’t think of it; walking past the closed bank, the shuttered front of the general store, the locked-up haberdasher’s, the drawn blinds of the dentist, she averted her gaze,” writes Davies. “She would do what she always did with the felons; she would bring Galen Pike something to eat and drink, she would sit with him and talk to him and keep him company in the days that he had left.”

The Irish novelist Éibhear Walshe, part of the judging panel for this year’s prize, called it “a truly original and striking collection, full of funny, keenly observed stories replete with twists and turns that surprise”.

Davies, Walshe said, was a “remarkable voice”, adding: “The language is economical with not a word to spare. Davies takes historical moments and themes and examines them in novel ways which intrigue the reader.”

The author pronounced herself “delighted, grateful, and completely astonished” to win the prize, which is sponsored by Cork city council and by the school of English, University College Cork.

Patrick Cotter, award director, praised Davies as a “gifted writer”, and her press Salt as “a small independent, gritty publisher which has been dedicated to the short story for over a decade, often publishing more short story titles in a year than the imprints of major international conglomerates”.