Peter Hollywood was twenty-one when his first short story ‘The Accident’ was accepted by the famed editor David Marcus for his New Irish Writing page in the Irish Press. The story was short-listed for that year’s Hennessy literary prize. Marcus went on to include another story, ‘The Dog’, in the anthology State of the Art: Short Stories by New Irish Writers (Hodder and Stoughton, 1992) which included stories by such acclaimed writers as Anne Enright, Maeve Binchy and John Banville.