Published in 2009, Love Begins in Winter is a short story collection by Anglo-American author Simon Van Booy. The collection won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award which, at €35,000, is the world's largest short story award. At the ceremony, Patrick Cotter (the Artistic Director of the Munster Literature Centre, which oversees the O’Connor Award) commented that “unusual for a work of serious literature, [Love Begins in Winter] won with its consistently positive and optimistic approach to examining the travails of human experience.”
Van Booy was born in London, raised in Wales, and educated at Dartington College of Arts before moving to New York. On the topic of his moving around, he said that "living abroad is almost like hiding from time, from culture, from one’s own narrative" and that he "feel[s] like [he is] on vacation all the time." On the influence of his Welsh upbringing on his work, Van Booy commented that "a lot of how [his] writing works, and the settings for many of [his] stories, are drawn from the time [he] spent in Ruthin, the walks [he] used to go on into the country, watching [his] older sister ride off with her latest boyfriend on the back of her motorbike. That all informed [his] sensibilities.”
Van Booy's first wife, Lorelei, passed away of an undiagnosed medical condition shortly before he began writing Love Begins in Winter and just three years after the birth of their daughter, Madeleine. According to Van Booy, he was able to stay positive by "try[ing] and remember[ing] that no matter what happens, there is a core that is [him]self, that is unbreakable; a place of light that cannot be diminished by how [he] perceive events in the world. It’s a place beyond the mind, and it’s where [his] stories come from." Before marrying his second wife, Christina, Van Booy strove to balance his writing career with raising Madeleine as a single father, and "ha[d] to be strict about his work/family life division" by writing in his bedroom with the door closed and managing his time wisely. His experiences of love, loss, and single fatherhood profoundly influenced Love Begins in Winter and his other works.
