Madeleine D’Arcy, graduate of UCC’s inaugural MA in Creative Writing class (2013/14) has been awarded the £1,000 Readers’ Choice award in this year’s Edge Hill Short Story Prize for her debut collection of stories, Waiting for the Bullet (Doire Press).

Now in its ninth year, the Edge Hill Prize is the only UK award that recognises excellence for a published collection of short stories. The 2015 judging panel included the Guardian’s Chris Power, the 2014 Readers’ Choice winner Rachel Trezise and Edge Hill University’s Dr Ailsa Cox.

Kirsty Gunn won the overall prize for her collection, Infidelities (Faber & Faber). The winners were announced at London’s Free Word Centre on July 2nd.

Speaking at the ceremony, Edge Hill Prize co-ordinator Dr Ailsa Cox, Reader in Creative Writing and English at Edge Hill University, praised the entire shortlist as showing “the huge range and diversity of short story writing today, and how many risks writers are taking with the form, with stories based on, amongst other things, twitter fiction, autobiographical memories, oral history and role-playing games. All of these collections are winners”.