Sweet Smell of Success: Winning the Rubery International Book Award 2025

Photography by Suzanne Thompson 2025, www.circusphotography.com

I'm absolutely delighted - and a little stunned - to reveal that I've won the Rubery International Book Award for Short Fiction for my 2021 collection, I Spit Myself Out. This is perhaps my favourite of the six books I've written, and the most personal - a deep dive into identity, uncertainty, fear and surrealism through the lens of the female body.. The Rubery Award said of it

A superb collection of literary horror that fills the reader with uncanny and abject imagery. More than that, it makes us feel it in rich visceral ways too. It is full of off-kilter bodies and and out-of-time locations, delivered with a style that fills the reader with disquiet. We’re deep within the minds and bodies of her characters, and close up on the flaking skin and blooming bruises of it all. ‘I’ll be Your Mirror’ is a wonderful piece about an acutely body-conscious woman troubled by how female anatomy signifies in our culture: particularly its impact on relationships, self-esteem, and mental health. We feel the crushing force of patriarchy at the end of the story as the speaker transforms herself into a museum exhibit, subject to the male gaze in perpetuity. A brilliant opening! ‘The Wrong Ones’ explores the dark legacy of abuse, buried both literally and symbolically in an Irish field. Again the body is central - the non-normative female is monsterered by her community, with catastrophic consequences. ‘Becoming’ takes the ageing body as its subject, its speaker tempted into an anti-ageing experiment, the details of which are revealed with the relish of an author who loves her work! Throughout the book Fahey creates unsettling realities, interrogating assumptions and taboos in provocative ways, her prose charged with subversive energy. The stories teem with disquieting moments, creating worlds we recognise until the possible and impossible collide! It is eminently compelling, at least for those with a strong stomach. It’s a beautifully crafted collection.