Canadian author Zsuzsi Gartner is the 2026 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow. The fellowship is very kindly funded by Cork City Council and is an initiative of the Munster Literature Centre. There is the opportunity for four Munster fiction writers to be mentored by Gartner, tuition fees covered, between September and November of this year. Complete guidelines and submission details are available at southword.submittable.com.
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 2nd August (MIDNIGHT)
Fiction Mentorships Bursaries with Frank O’Connor Fellow Zsuzsi Gartner
Zsuzsi Gartner is the author of the Giller Prize finalist fiction collection Better Living through Plastic Explosives and of the widely acclaimed story collection All the Anxious Girls on Earth. Her first novel, The Beguiling, was a finalist for the 2020 Writers Trust Fiction Prize and a Globe & Mail Best Book of 2020. Her fiction has been widely anthologized and read on the CBC and NPR and won National Magazine Awards. She was the inaugural Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow for Cork, Ireland in 2016, and ran The Writers Adventure Camp in Whistler for four years. She has been on faculty at the Banff Centre for the Arts and The University of British Columbia’s MFA Program. Zsuzsi edited the award-winning fiction anthology Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow and was the guest editor of the Best Canada Stories 2026 anthology. She is completing her fourth book (third short fiction collection) and lives in Vancouver, Canada.