BBC National Short Story Award 2018
ALL-FEMALE SHORTLIST FOR
THIRTEENTH BBC NATIONAL SHORT STORY
AWARD
I'm sure you've all seen by now the shortlist for the BBC Short Story Award but I would just like to add my congratulations to the writers who have all been nominated!
Here's a little bit more information about the writers and the stories which have made the shortlist.
SARAH HALL
Sarah Hall’s ‘Sudden Traveller’ is a powerful meditation on life
and death encompassing the death of a mother and the birth of a child. Set
in a moment in time, it tells the story of a young woman nursing her child
as her father and brother clear the cemetery ready for her mother’s
burial. Contemplative and tender, the second person narrative captures the
numbing and distancing effect of grief, whilst rendering the moment both
personal and universal.
Sarah Hall is the prize-winning author of five
novels – Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo, The Carhullan Army,
How to Paint a Dead Man and The Wolf Border. Her
first short story collection, The Beautiful Indifference, won
the Portico Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. The first story in
the collection, Butcher’s Perfume,
was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Her
second collection, Madame Zero, was published in 2017 and
is currently shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. The
lead story, ‘Mrs Fox’, won the BBC National Short
Story Award in 2013 and the last story, ‘Evie’, was
shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. ‘Sudden Traveller’ is an original commission
by Audible for the Bard series of short stories.
Sarah was born in Cumbria and now
lives in Norwich.
KERRY ANDREW
To Belong To’ was
inspired by a week Kerry Andrew spent
on Fair Isle in 2016 with the classical ensemble Chroma. Written just after the
Brexit vote, the idea of islands, communities and their ability to embrace
outsiders is told in the story of a grieving, desperate man saved from suicide
by Anna, a fellow outsider now resident islander, who invites him into her
home. The island, its beauty and seasonal rhythms, and the islanders nurture
him back to life in a beautifully told story celebrating the healing power of
community and friendship.
Kerry
Andrew is a composer and writer. Her debut novel, Swansong, was published by Jonathan Cape in January 2018. She
performed her debut short story One
Swallow on BBC Radio 4 in 2014. She is the winner of four British
Composer Awards and has a PhD in Composition from the University of York.
As a composer, she specialises in experimental vocal and choral music,
music-theatre and community music. She made her BBC Proms debut in 2017
with No Place Like for BBC Ten Pieces and was Chair of the jury for the
BBC Young Musician of the Year 2018. She performs alternative folk music
under the banner of You Are Wolf and sings with award-winning a cappella
trio Juice Vocal Ensemble.
Originally
from High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, Kerry lives in London.
INGRID PERSAUD
‘The
Sweet Sop’ by Ingrid Persaud
is set in Trinidad and is the moving story of Victor, a young man getting
to know his absent father, Reggie, for the first time as he is dying. Told
in West Indian patois, chocolate becomes their medium of communication as the
parent/child relationship inverts and the story of their lost past – and
the night of Reggie’s death – unfolds. Terminal illness and the recent
deaths of close family members inspired the story as did the true story of
an assassination engineered by regularly feeding the victim poisoned
Belgian chocolates.
Born in Trinidad, Ingrid Persaud has had lives as a legal academic teaching at King’s College London, a Goldsmith College and Central St Martins trained visual artist and a project manager. Although she came to writing later in life, she has always been preoccupied with the power of words, both in her academic work and her exploration of text as art. Persaud is the 2017 winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and her work has appeared in Granta, Prospect and Pree magazines.
Her physical homes are London and Barbados which she shares with ‘The Husband, teenaged twin boys, a feral chicken and two rescue dogs'.
KIARE LADNER
Van Rensburg’s Card’ by Kiare Ladner is the
poignant story of fractured families and the inevitability of change as Greta a
slightly grumpy South African maths teacher, sets out to eat in the shopping
mall one evening after work. Widowed 18 months previously and with her only
daughter living abroad, she is fuelled by loneliness and self-doubt, until she
finds a forgotten condolence card in her bag from neighbour, Arthur van Rensburg.
What was previously thought of as intrusion suddenly becomes a lifeline. Will
this be an opportunity to ‘reshape’ her life?
Kiare Ladner’s debut novel, Nightshift, will be published by
Picador in late 2019. She wrote it together with short stories as part of
a funded Creative Writing PhD at Aberystwyth University. During the PhD,
her short stories were shortlisted in competitions (including the Bridport
Prize, the Short Fiction Competition, the Short Sharp Stories Award and
South Million Writers Award). They were also published in journals and
anthologies in the UK, where she lives now, and South Africa, where she
grew up (these include Lightship
Anthology 1, New Contrast and
Wasafiri). Before the PhD, she was given the David Higham
Scholarship for her MA Prose Writing at the University of East Anglia.
Before that, she worked in a range of jobs for academics, with prisoners
and doing nightshifts.
Kiare
was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and is now based in London.
NELL STEVENS
The Minutes’ by
Nell Stevens is the most
experimental of the stories on the shortlist and tells the story of a hapless
student collective as they plan ‘The Ascension of Waderley’, a protest against
the planned demolition of a South London tower block. Told as an address to an
unnamed figure, a revered lecturer and potential lover who gives legitimacy to
the group as a former resident of the tower block, this is a tense, intelligent
love story exploring the nature of art as protest and the politics of class.
Nell
Stevens was born in Oxford.
Her first book, Bleaker House, was published in 2017 and her memoir Mrs
Gaskell & Me (UK) / The
Victorian and the Romantic (US, CAN), a blend of life writing and
historical fiction, was published this year. Nell has a PhD in Victorian
literature from King's College London, and an MFA in Fiction from Boston
University.
She is a Lecturer in
Creative Writing at Goldsmiths University and lives in London.
From Monday 17 September: The stories
shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University will
be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 from Monday 17 to Friday 21 September
2018 from 3.30 to 4pm, and then available on BBC iPlayer
and via the
BBC Short Story Podcast.
Also from Monday 17 September: An anthology – The
BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University 2018 – introduced
by Chair of Judges Stig Abell and published by Comma Press will be available at
www.commapress.co.uk and all good
bookshops priced £7.99.
DON'T MISS THE ANNOUNCEMENTS OF THE WINNER!
Tuesday 2 October: The winner announcements of the BBC National Short Story Award with
Cambridge University 2018 and the BBC Young Writers’ Award with First Story and
Cambridge University will be broadcast live from the award ceremony at the Cambridge
University on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row from 7.15pm.
For more information you can check out this link:
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION ON THE
AWARD PLEASE VISIT
For AWARD PRESS ENQUIRIES
contact Emma Draude or Bethan James at emma@edpr.co.uk
or bethan@edpr.co.uk
or call 020 7732 4796/07801 307735
or
for BBC RADIO 4 PRESS ENQUIRIES contact Sean Harwood at sean.harwood@bbc.co.uk
or on 07718695382
or on 07718695382
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