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Bernie McGill

Novelist, Short-story writer

About

Bernie McGill is the 2023 winner of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize for her collection This Train is For (No Alibis Press). She is the author of two novels: The Watch House (nominated for the Ireland European Union Prize for Literature in 2019) and The Butterfly Cabinet (named by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes as his novel of the year in 2012). Her first collection of stories, Sleepwalkers, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill in 2014 and she is a former winner of the Zoetrope:All-Story Short Fiction Award in the US. Her work has appeared in anthologies The Black DreamsHer Other LanguageBelfast StoriesThe Long Gaze BackThe Glass Shore and Female Lines and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s The Essay and Radio 4’s Short Works.

Bernie has an MA in Irish Writing from Queen’s University, Belfast. She is the recipient of a number of Arts Council of Northern Ireland awards including an International Artists’ Development Fund Award to complete a residency at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice in 2023. She lives in Portstewart in Northern Ireland and works as a professional mentor with the Irish Writers’ Centre and as an RLF Writing for Life Fellow.

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