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A BRIEF STORY about the Irish woman who tried to assassinate Mussolini won the RTÉ story contest.
Flower Wild, a short story by Shane Tivenan, was announced tonight as the winner of the RTÉ Story Contest honoring Francis MacManus, one of Ireland’s top literary awards.
The announcement was made live in Arena on RTÉ Radio 1 as part of a special program dedicated to the awards.
Flower Wild was described by the judges as “fascinating” and “an exceptional piece for the radio”. The piece is an imagined interior monologue by Violet Gibson, the Irishwoman who tried to assassinate Mussolini.
“I ran into Violet Gibson listening to Lisa O’Neill’s song about her. I researched more about Violet’s life during the following months and I found many unknowns, ”said Tivenan, who is from Athlone but is an English teacher who currently lives in Madrid.
“What stories did she need to tell herself before shooting and shooting an Italian dictator? Was it possible that she stayed sane in that asylum for three decades? Was she able to make peace with complete abandonment, with herself, at the end of a life? These questions haunted me until I wrote Flower Wild. “
This is Shane’s first published and broadcast short story since he began writing in 2018.
Second place was awarded to Alan Walsh’s Kissing Booth story from the town of Wicklow. Third is The Shape on the Strand by Katherine Duffy, from Dundalk but who lives in Churchtown, Dublin.
Alan Walsh
Source: RTÉ
Kissing Booth was described as “a biased and brilliant view of this year’s global pandemic.”
“Kissing Booth tries to reverse a familiar narrative and how that could unexpectedly lead to a utopian conclusion,” Walsh said.
“I really liked the idea of writing towards a utopia, with the wide range of meanings that the word can have, and how to build interesting and unexpected ways of getting there.”
Katherine duffy
Source: RTÉ
Meanwhile, The Shape on the Strand is a “clever and funny ghost story set on a nameless Spanish island.” “I came up with the idea of a writer stalking his translator when he was abroad and was losing sleep over a difficult literary translation project, just like the main character in the story,” Duffy said. “But there the link with reality ends and the literary ghost story begins …”
This year’s judges are: editor, speaker, and journalist, Madeleine Keane; award-winning short story writer and former RTÉ Story Contest award winner Danielle McLaughlin; and writer and broadcaster Vincent Woods.
Shane Tivenan will receive € 3,000, while € 2,000 and € 1,000 will be awarded to Alan Walsh and Katherine Duffy respectively. Each of the seven finalists will receive € 250.
The 10 shortlisted stories will air in a season of new writing on RTÉ Radio 1, starting tonight at 11:20 pm with the winning story, to be read by Ingrid Craigie.
The three winning stories will also appear in TheJournal.ie.
RTÉ received a record number of entries for this year’s competition: more than 4,000.
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Sarah Binchy, producer of the RTÉ Short Story Competition series, said: “Our congratulations to the award winners and all the finalists. These talented writers are literary names to be reckoned with. We look forward to bringing their richly imagined stories to a wide audience on radio and podcast for the next two weeks. “
As a measure of the particularly high standard of this year’s entries, the judges also gave a special mention to five other stories out of the 10 short-listed short stories:
In the Highly Recommended category are:
- The Atlantic’s Cold Edge, by Kieran Marsh, Dublin 5
- Fata Morgana, by Paul Duffy, Co Wicklow
- Discarded, by Lem Kinlon, Co Kildare
- Egg Bed, Bed Eggs, from Rory Duffy, Co Westmeath
- Dead Water, by James Martyn Joyce, Co Galway
An original short story contest for radio was first established in 1986 in memory of Francis MacManus (1909-1965). He was a novelist, biographer and former head of Talks and Reports on Radio Éireann.
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