Keret and Englander Nominated for Award

Israeli author Etgar Keret. Image by YANAI YECHIEL
Israeli writer Etgar Keret and American author Nathan Englander have both been shortlisted for the 2012 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the biggest prize in the world for a short story collection. Keret was nominated for “Suddenly a Knock on the Door,” and Englander received a nod for “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.”
There are a total of six finalists for the award. The other four are Kevin Barry of Ireland, Fiona Kidman of New Zealand, Sarah Hall of the UK, and Lucia Perillo of the U.S. This is Keret’s second time being shortlisted, and Englander has two chances of winning the award, since he translated much of Keret’s collection — and if a translation wins, the author and the translator share the prize.
This is the eighth year that the €25,000 ($31,500) prize, for the best original short story collection published in English by a living author, is being awarded. It is a gift of the Munster Literature Centre and will presented at the Cork International Short Story Festival in September. The award will be announced this summer, as early as July 5.
The award is named for Frank O’Connor, an Irish author from Cork, who produced more than 150 works in his lifetime, before dying in Dublin at age 62 in 1966. Previous winners have been Haruki Murakami (2006), Jhumpa Lahiri (2008) and Edna O’Brien (2011).
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Make a Passover Gift Today!
Most Popular
- 1
News Student protesters being deported are not ‘martyrs and heroes,’ says former antisemitism envoy
- 2
News Who is Alan Garber, the Jewish Harvard president who stood up to Trump over antisemitism?
- 3
Opinion What Jewish university presidents say: Trump is exploiting campus antisemitism, not fighting it
- 4
Opinion Yes, the attack on Gov. Shapiro was antisemitic. Here’s what the left should learn from it
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Antisemitic incidents on college campuses rose over 80 percent last year, says the ADL
-
Fast Forward As the last generation of Holocaust survivors ages, advocates call for their testimonies to be heard
-
Fast Forward Jewish Federations CEO privately opposed a Jewish open letter criticizing Trump’s campus arrests
-
News Harvard’s Jewish president, suing Trump administration, says he knows antisemitism — and the government’s moves have ‘nothing to do’ with fighting it
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.