BBC National Short Story Award
The BBC National Short Story Award is the largest award for a single short story in the world. I’ve just finished reading the 2009 winning entry “The Not Dead and The Saved” by Kate Clanchy. It’s a brilliant and incredibly moving tale of a mother and son and their journey towards his death.
This is the second award that the story has won, the first being the 2009 VS Pritchett Memorial prize administered by the Royal Society for Literature. Short stories, Kate told Prospect magazine, are a new venture. “This is my third. I’m pleased that it is entirely fictional; both because making something up is a new thing for me, and because my own children are lucky enough to be well.”
Wow! she has certainly found a successful form for her creative talent. Not only is the prize a hefty £15,000 for the winner but the comments from previous winners show the boost that winning a competition can give to a writer’s confidence.
Julian Gough, winner in 2007 said “Winning the BBC National Short Story Award changed my life. A couple of years ago, I was unpublished, broke, recently evicted, and homeless. Then I won the Award, which not only saved my writing life, but also perhaps my actual life. It allowed me to pay off my back rent and other debts, and it banished the despair I had felt, as my work grew better, and the rewards worse.”
“As publishing grows ever more conservative, trying to write something different, something new, can be lonely, dispiriting, and financially disastrous. Being awarded such a prestigious prize, by such highly-regarded judges, changed the way my work was read, and created a new space for it. Work previously considered ‘brilliant but unpublishable’ has since been published to great acclaim, translated, and shortlisted for other prizes.”
“This Prize makes a huge difference, and I´m very grateful to it. By shining a bright light on the short story, it ensures more writers will step onto that small but daunting stage, and that a great performance there will be properly rewarded.”
Read Kate’s winning entry and find out more about the competitions she entered by following the link below
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2009/11/the-not-dead-and-the-saved/
Bookmark and check in regularly with www.theshortstory.org.uk for announcements of the 2010 award.
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