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Billy O'Callaghan

Biography

Billy O'Callaghan

Billy O’Callaghan was born in Cork in 1974, and is the author of three short story collections: IN EXILE, IN TOO DEEP and THE THINGS WE LOSE, THE THINGS WE LEAVE BEHIND, which was honoured with a Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award and selected as Cork’s "One City, One Book" for 2017.

His first novel, THE DEAD HOUSE, an Irish bestseller, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was favorably reviewed in several major newspapers, including the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Winner of a Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award, and twice a recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland’s Bursary Award for Literature, among numerous other honours, his story, "The Boatman," was a finalist for the 2016 Costa Short Story Award. More than a hundred of his stories have appeared or are forthcoming in literary journals and magazines around the world, including Absinthe: New European Writing, Agni, the Bellevue Literary Review, the Chattahoochee Review, Confrontation, the Fiddlehead, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Kenyon Review, the Kyoto Journal, the London Magazine, the Los Angeles Review, Narrative, Ploughshares, Salamander and the Saturday Evening Post.

Billy O'Callaghan

Books by Billy O'Callaghan

The Boatman and Other Stories
by Billy O'Callaghan - Fiction, Short Stories

Spanning a century and two continents --- from the muddy fields of Ireland to a hotel room in Paris, a dingy bar in Segovia to an airplane bound for Taipei --- Billy O’Callaghan’s 12 stories explore the resiliency of the human heart and its ability to keep beating in the wake of bereavement, violence, lost love, and incomparable trauma and grief. Three gunshots on the Irish border define the course of a young man’s life; a writer clings fast to a star-crossed affair with a woman who has never been fully within his reach; a fisherman accustomed to hard labor rolls up his sleeves to dig a grave for his child; and a pair of newlyweds embark on their first adventure, living wild on the deserted Beginish Island.

My Coney Island Baby
by Billy O'Callaghan - Fiction

On a bitterly cold winter’s afternoon, Michael and Caitlin, two middle-aged lovers, escape their unhappy marriages to keep an illicit date. Once a month for the past quarter of a century, Coney Island has been their haven, the place in which they have abandoned themselves to their love. But on this winter day, they will discover that their lives are on the brink of change. Michael’s wife is battling cancer, and Caitlin’s husband is about to receive a major promotion, which will involve relocating to the Midwest. After half a lifetime together in their most intimate moments, certain long-denied facts must be faced, decisions made, consequences weighed and --- maybe, just maybe --- chances finally taken.