Writers - Surnames B

Kevin Barry

Kevin Barry is the author of three short story collections, most recently That Old Country Music, and four novels, most recently The Heart In Winter. His stories have won the Sunday Times Short Story Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and, twice, the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. His other awards include the Dublin Literary Award, the EU Prize for Literature and the Goldsmiths Prize. His novel, Night Boat To Tangier, was nominated for the Booker Prize and was a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year. His stories regularly appear in the New Yorker and he has been translated into more than 20 languages. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter. He lives in County Sligo.

Rute Beirante

Rute Beirante has a Degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences, an M.A. in Biotechnology and Renewable Natural Resources, and a Degree in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Lisbon, where she is a researcher at ULICES (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies). She is presently preparing a Ph.D. on American Literature and has been teaching at the University. She has published articles, chapters in books, poems, and short stories.

Clark Blaise

Clark Blaise is a Canadian-American author of twenty books, and co-editor of seven more; ten of them short story collections, three of them novels, and seven non-fiction works ranging through literary criticism, travel, memoir, biography, investigative journalism and most recently The Cruelest Gift (2016), a medical-memoir of his family’s struggle with inherited diseases. He served as Director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and founded the graduate writing program at Concordia University in Montreal, now Canada’s largest. He has taught at McGill and Concordia, Columbia, Skidmore, Emory, Cal-Berkeley, Iowa, NYU and Sarah Lawrence. He holds three honorary degrees (Denison University, his alma mater, McGill and Concordia), and has lectured in thirty countries. He is an officer in the Order of Canada, and he holds a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the Board Chair of the Society for the Study of the Short Story, the parent organization of the conference.

Carmen Bretones

Carmen M. Bretones Callejas, author of The Iconic Power of the Short Story: Exploring Culture, Cognition, and Affective Involvement in Seamus Heaney (Peter Lang, 2024), is the Head of the Department of Philology at the University of Almería, Spain, where she has been lecturing on English Semantics, English Pragmatics, and Interculturality since 2003. She holds a degree in English Philology and obtained her Ph.D. cum laude with European mention in the Program of English Language and Applied Linguistics from the University of Granada. In addition, she completed a master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience through a joint program between the Universities of Almería, La Laguna, and Murcia in 2007.

Catherine Bush

Catherine Bush is the author of five novels and the short story collection, Skin (2025, Goose Lane Editions). Her work has been critically acclaimed, published and anthologized internationally, and shortlisted for numerous awards. Her most recent novel, Blaze Island, was a Globe and Mail and a Writers’ Trust of Canada Best Book of the Year, and a Hamilton Reads 2021 Selection. Her other novels include the Canada Reads long-listed Accusation; the Trillium Award shortlisted Claire's Head; the national bestselling novel The Rules of Engagement, which was also named a New York Times Notable Book and a L.A. Times Best Book of the Year; and Minus Time, shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award and the Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her nonfiction has been published in journals such as Emergence and Noema, also in Best Canadian Essays. She has written and spoken internationally about addressing the climate crisis in fiction and the creative writing classroom. The recipient of numerous fellowships, including from MacDowell and Yaddo, she was the 2024 Writer-in-Residence Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich, and a 2019 Fiction Meets Science Fellow, also in Germany. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, she lives in Toronto and in an old schoolhouse in Eastern Ontario. www.catherinebush.com

Robert Olen Butler

Robert Olen Butler has written nineteen novels and six volumes of short stories, one of which, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has appeared four times in The Best American Short Stories and eight times in New Stories from the South. He was also the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. His works have been translated into twenty-one languages. His latest novel, Twice Around a Marriage, is soon forthcoming from TCU Press. Butler teaches creative writing at Florida State University and lives in Capps, Florida.

International Conference on the Short Story in English 2025

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17th International Conference on the Short Story in English