A selective objective
This year’s shortlist for the 2017 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award – open to any novelist or short-story writer published in the UK, and at £30,000 the richest prize in the world for short fiction – includes three women and three men, four American writers, one British and one Irish author. The US writers...
Fearless flourish
Irenosen Okojie is a remarkable writer. I discovered this late last year, when her second book Speak Gigantular, a collection of extraordinary short stories – was submitted by Jacaranda Books for the Jhalak Prize, a literary award for writers from ethnic minority backgrounds. As one of the judges, I would carry two or three books...
Internet dating for immortals
George sat on the park bench, holding his head in his hands. He’d already turned away a couple of concerned passers-by, assuring them, between sobs, that he would be all right. And he would, he knew. Experience told him that. But it didn’t make it any easier. It was always tough saying goodbye. It hadn’t...
The shovelist
Guillaume Morin stood at his kitchen window, peering through the falling snow. Across the street, two men in matching brown leather jackets were unloading boxes from a metallic blue Cadillac and lugging them into Suzanne Sillery’s old place. “Stop staring! It’s not proper.” Guillaume looked at his wife. She was seated at the kitchen table,...
Human rights and wrongs
The Old Familiar Faces are unhappily gathered at a once-elegant four-star golf resort and conference centre to which tourists no longer come. In the reception area and in their workshop room, the Jacaranda room on the second floor, banners proclaim the theme of their workshop: “Assessing, Analysing and Evaluating the Impact of Political Violence on...
India
The obvious irony was that she wasn’t from India. She didn’t know where she was from, ethnically speaking, but she could pretty much count on not being Indian. Why her adoptive parents named her India was not a story she liked to tell. She bore the burden of being beautiful. A burden few others could...
Apocalypse never
In his Brief Theory of Travel and the Desert, skilfully translated with grit and brio by Jacqueline Minett, Cristian Crusat orchestrates a syncopated arrangement of six stories suspended in time and space, relating the experience of being and non-being through stunted snapshots from the lives of disparate, seemingly ordinary and inconsequential characters. Their insignificance, we...
The many faces of Lucy Caldwell
Multitudes is the first book of short stories from the prizewinning novelist and playwright Lucy Caldwell. The collection is eleven stories strong and each of the stories seems to describe a character in peril so that holding one’s breath whilst reading them sometimes feels unavoidable. Caldwell agrees to meet me to discuss the stories and...
Six by six
The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award shortlist has been announced, and we’re delighted to share an extract from each of the stories. The six selected authors – three women and three men from five countries and three continents – also reflect the award’s stated aim to celebrate the best emerging writers alongside established names....
Helen Ellis: Back with a bang
Helen Ellis is as surprised as anyone at the success she’s having with her short story collection American Housewife. “I’m sure you know my back story,” she says politely when we meet for this interview, and yes, it’s been hard to miss since heavyweights such as The New York Times and Vogue have run recent...
Putting the pieces together
K J Orr’s short fiction has won the Dan Hemingway Prize and a Bridport Prize, been Pushcart Prize nominated, and shortlisted for awards including the BBC National Short Story Award, the Asham Award, the London Short Story Prize and the KWS Hilary Mantel International Short Story Prize. Her debut collection Light Box is out now...
Spats
The dogs are scratching at the kitchen door. How long, Lydia thinks, has she been lost in the thought of her rival dead? She passes her hand over her eyes, an unconscious effort to push the hot red edge off everything she sees, and goes to the door to let them in. When Ivan confessed...
