Portstewart woman placed in prestigious Bridport Prize

This annual competition for short stories and poetry is one of the most prestigious open literary awards in the UK. Bernie McGill, a facilitator with creative writing groups, scooped the prize for her story "Home".

She was also the second prize winner i n the 2010 Sean

O ' F a o l a i n S h o r t S t o r y Competition and first prizewinner

in the Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Contest (US) in 2008.

She co-wrote The Haunting of Helena Blunden for Big Telly Theatre Company in 2010, and s h e w r o t e T h e Wea t h e r Watchers, a play for young audiences for Cahoots NI in 2006.

Her short fiction has been broadcast by BBC Radio Ulster and published in The Belfast Telegraph. She is the recipient of two Individual Artist Awards from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Her first novel, The Butterfly Cabinet was published in the UK and Ireland in August this year by Headline Review, is about to be published in Italian and in Dutch, and will be published in the US by Free Press in 2011.

The competition attracts thousands of entries, not just from

the UK, but also from over 85 countries around the world. But it was Bernie McGill's story that took the eye of renowned author and competition judge Zoe Heller, who said: "The winning authors were so

consistently deft and alert and confident in their command of

their material, that choosing them was really no choice at all: they more or less demanded to win."