Bernie McGill is the 2023 winner of the prestigious Edge Hill Short Story Prize for her collection This Train is For. She is the author of one further collection of short stories entitled Sleepwalkers and two novels, The Butterfly Cabinet and The Watch House (shortlisted for the Irish/European Union Prize for Literature in 2019). Her short fiction has been shortlisted for numerous awards and is anthologised in: The Black Dreams, The Cormorant, Her Other Voices, Belfast Stories, Reading the Future, Female Lines, The Glass Shore and The Long Gaze Back. In 2008 she won the Zoetrope:All-Story Short Fiction Award in the US.
She is a recipient of a number of Arts Council of Northern Ireland Awards. She lives in Portstewart in Northern Ireland with her family and works as a Writing Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund (RLF), as a professional mentor with the Irish Writers’ Centre and as a Writer in Schools with Poetry Ireland. She is a former RLF Writing Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast.
