Authors from six different countries, including Ireland, have been shorlisted for this year's Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize.
This is the second year of the prize which is funded by Cork City Council, administered by the Munster Literature Centre in Cork and awarded in association with The Irish Times.
The €35,000 literary prize will be presented at a ceremony in Cork in September during the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival.
The O'Connor prize, the world's most valuable award for a story collection, was established as part of Cork's year as European Capital of Culture in 2005.
The inaugural prize was won last year by the Chinese-born writer Liyun Li for a debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.
The 2005 award, worth €50,000, was sponsored by O'Flynn Construction as part of the Cork 2005 programme. At the close of Cork's tenure as capital of culture the City Council announced it was to continue funding the award in memory of one of the city's most famous authors.
The international panel of judges is chaired by Cork-based poet Thomas McCarthy, who was a programme director of Cork 2005.
He is joined by Irish short story writer Claire Keegan; English author Toby Litt; German poet and fiction writer Silke Scheuermann; and Dr Maurice A. Lee, director of the International Conference on the Short Story in English.