UCF alumnus wins Frank O’Connor award

Dartington alumnus, Simon Van Booy, has won the world's richest and most prestigious short story prize, the Frank O'Connor award, for his second collection, Love Begins in Winter.

The Frank O'Connor award is presented annually to the best original collection of short stories from around the world and this year, Simon scooped the prize ahead of five other short story collections, including Everything Raged, Everything Burned by US author, Wells Towers and Zimbabwean Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly, to win the €35,000 (£30,000) prize.

Now living in New York with his daughter, Simon graduated from Dartington College of Arts in 1999 with a degree in Performance Writing. In 2002, Simon was awarded a Master of Fine Arts and won the H R Hays Poetry Award.

At an awards ceremony in Cork as part of the International Short Story Festival on Sunday evening, Simon said he was both surprised and "very, very grateful" to have won. "I was very nervous about coming to Cork for the Frank O'Connor festival," he said, according to the Irish Examiner. "But I stopped being nervous when I read the other shortlisted books. I was shocked by the quality of the work, and knew I had no hope of winning."

Love Begins in Winter is a collection of five stories about people on the verge of giving up including a cellist who falls in love with a shop owner obsessed with birds. "Love is one of his themes - the power of love to over some tragedy, the longing for it, what it means, how it can transcend generations," said Simon Petherick, Simon's publisher at Beautiful Books.

Simon was born in London, grew up in Wales and Oxford and spent two years playing football in Kentucky before moving to New York, via Paris and Athens, where he now writes for the New York Times and New York Post. Simon also teaches Humanities including subjects in Heroes and Villains, Self-Portraiture through Literature and Ancient Literature at the School of Visual Arts in New York and at Long Island University. Simon also helps young adults living in disadvantaged communities in Brooklyn through the Rutgers Early College Humanities programme (REaCH).

Love Begins in Winter was launched at the Partners & Spade Gallery in Soho, New York, alongside Simon's own art installation pieces based on scenes from his book. The collection is published by Beautiful Books http://www.beautiful-books.co.uk/, priced £7.99. ISBN 9781905636495.

"All in UCF's Performance Writing Field send warm congratulations to Simon for this hugely significant achievement," said Dr Larry Lynch, Field Director of Writing at UCF's Dartington Campus.  "It is very gratifying to see the work of another of our graduates enjoying international acclaim and reinforces the belief that our unique approach to the practice-based study of writing has much to offer those wishing to develop sustainable practices across a wide range of media."

Simon will be visiting University College Falmouth's Tremough Campus in the near future to share his experiences with students.

Previous winners of the Frank O'Connor award include Haruki Murakami, Chimanda Ngozi Adiche, Jhumpa Lahiri and Ali Smith.

Frank O'Connor was the pseudonym of Michael O'Donovan who was born in Cork in 1903. Largely self-educated, he began to prepare a collected edition of his works at the age of twelve and later worked as a librarian, translator and journalist. He published his first book, Guests of the Nation, in 1931, followed by over thirty volumes, largely of short stories, in addition to plays. He taught in the United States at Harvard, Northwestern and Stanford and in Ireland at Trinity College Dublin, which awarded him a D. Litt in 1962. His work has been published in Germany, France, Japan, Denmark, Spain, Italy and Sicily. Frank O'Connor died in 1966.

For further information about BA(Hons) Writing at University College Falmouth's Dartington Campus, visit www.falmouth.ac.uk/writing, email admissions@dartington.ac.uk or telephone Admissions on 01803 861620 or for further information regarding MA Professional Writing at University College Falmouth's Tremough Campus, visit www.falmouth.ac.uk/professionalwriting, email admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or telephone 01326 214374.

University College Falmouth is the only independent Higher Education institution in Cornwall with the powers to award degrees in its own name. It has two campuses in Cornwall - at Woodlane in Falmouth and Tremough in Penryn (which it owns, and jointly manages with the University of Exeter) - and a third campus at Totnes in Devon, following its merger with Dartington College of Arts in 2008.

This merger created a new institution focusing on the expansion of Falmouth's expertise in Art, Design and Media and Dartington's expertise in Choreography, Music, Theatre, Art and Writing. The Devon-based courses will relocate to a new, high-specification Performance Centre at Tremough in 2010, paving the way for a new specialist Arts University in Cornwall by 2012/2013 that will be unique to the South West.

The College is a founding partner in the Combined Universities in Cornwall (CUC), a unique initiative to promote regional economic regeneration through Higher Education, funded mainly by the European Union (Objective One), the South West Regional Development Agency, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, with support from Cornwall Council.

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For further information about University College Falmouth, please contact Jilly Easterby MCIPR, Head of Public Affairs, Telephone: 01326 213792, or email: jilly.easterby@falmouth.ac.uk

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