Announced this weekend, Windsor-raised author Alexander MacLeod is a finalist for the 2011 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, recognized for his debut collection Light Lifting. The €35,000 (approximately $47,000 CAD) prize is awarded to the best English-language short story collection of the past year. The award was created in honour of the late short story writer Frank O’Connor and is given out annually at a ceremony in his hometown of Cork, Ireland.
MacLeod is nominated along with six others whose origins range from China to America. Light Lifting, described as “a suite of darkly urban and unflinching elegies,” has already won the Best First Book Award at the Atlantic Book Awards, and was also shortlisted for the 2010 Giller Prize and the regional Caribbean and Canada division of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. MacLeod currently lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and teaches at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.
The award will be presented on September 18.
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