Kate Clanchy wins the National Short Story award

A human life in 5,000 words

I was lucky enough to be present yesterday at the live presentation of the BBC National Short Story Award—and I was doubly delighted that, from an exceptional shortlist, the winning story was announced as Kate Clanchy’s “The Not-Dead and the Saved,” which was first published in the current edition of Prospect and is now free to read in its entirety on our website. The National Short Story Award, which Prospect co-founded, is in fact the second prize this story has won this year; last month, I was one of the three judges who awarded it the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize, marking the first year of Prospect’s collaboration with the Royal Society of Literature on this award. It’s a success that’s richly deserved; it’s also a joy to see, however momentarily, such attention gathering around a remarkable piece of creative writing.

The death and re-birth of the short story is an eternal topic of conversation in the British media, and an eternally dull one. What’s certain, though, is that the best short stories need no apologies or external apparatus to make the case for their value. Lodged in the awkward middle ground between a poem and a novel, the short story is a form that either works on its own terms or doesn’t wok at all, and is best read with as little hand-wringing as possible over its status in the wider world of publishing. It’s true that major publishers are reluctant to back collections of stories from all but the biggest names in the field. But it’s also true that some of the most exciting writing currently around can only exist in this form, and that “The Not-Dead and the Saved” is an object lesson in its merits: its range and economy, its density of effect, its impatience with the extraneous, the lazy and the clichéd.

The best writers are drawn to the short story form for all manner of reasons, but at its heart is something that should be true of all literature—it allows people to say things that they couldn’t express in any other way. Reading Kate Clanchy’s story, I hope you’ll agree that very little more needs to be added.

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Franco-British Council Short Story Prize: the results

This is now the second year that Prospect has collaborated with the Franco-British Council on its annual prize for short fiction about France, and it was my pleasure this year to sit on the panel of judges choosing a winner in the two categories: secondary schools and undergraduates. Also on the panel were Baroness Joyce Quin, Boyd Tonkin of the Independent, and the authors Ian Rankin and Bonnie Greer—and between us we selected six exceptional stories as prize winners, all of which you can now read on the Prospect website (click here to see the top three secondary school stories, and here for the top three undergraduate ones).

As I’ve discussed before in Prospect, literary prizes often stir mixed emotions in both readers and judges. Here, though, the overwhelming sense was of great pleasure at the eloquence and skill on display, especially at a time when it’s become almost axiomatic that students’ and school pupils’ writing abilities are stunted in comparison to those of previous generations. I felt that the two winning stories, in particular—”Basma” by Claire Coggins in the secondary school category and “Gaston Gets His Just Desserts” by Karis Fiorucci in the undergraduate category—were remarkable achievements, and urge you to read them. Our thanks to all who entered, and congratulations to all six prize-winners: Claire Coggins, James Greenwood and Laura James in the schools category, and Karis Fiorucci, David Wolf and Arabella Millbank in the undergraduate.

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