Authors from five countries, including two from the US, have been shortlisted for this year's Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize.
This is the third year of the prize, which is funded by Cork City Council, administered by the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, and is awarded in association with The Irish Times.
The €35,000 prize will be presented during the closing ceremony of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival in Cork this September. The award was originally established as part of Cork's year as European Capital of Culture in 2005 and is the most valuable prize in the world for a short story collection.
The authors shortlisted for the 2007 prize include two filmmakers, an actor and the erstwhile chief executive of two of the world's largest digital media companies.
They are: British writer Simon Robson for The Separate Heart (Jonathan Cape); Olaf Olafsson, from Iceland, for Valentines (Pantheon Books); Etgar Keret, from Israel, for Missing Kissinger (Chatto & Windus); Miranda July, from the US, for No One Belongs Here More Than You (Canongate); Charlotte Grimshaw, from New Zealand, for Opportunity (Random House); and Manuel Muñoz, from the US, for The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue (Algonquin Books).
The inaugural prize, two years ago, was won by the Chinese-born writer, Liyun Li, for her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, while last year's award was won by Haruki Murakami, one of Japan's best known writers, for the collection, Blind Willow Sleeping Woman.
The judges this year are authors Rick Moody, Segun Afolabi and Nuala Ní Chonchúir, and the chairman of the panel is Munster Literature Centre director Pat Cotter.