Britain’s Liverpool-Irish shadow chancellor John McDonnell may have got into trouble for joking about assassinating Margaret Thatcher but Hilary Mantel has no such problems.
Her short story, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, has made the shortlist for the BBC National Short Story Award 2015 with Book Trust. Unpublished stories by The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time author Mark Haddon, Jonathan Buckley, Frances Leviston and Jeremy Page are also in the running for this year’s award.
Now celebrating its tenth birthday, the award is one of the most prestigious for a single short story, with the winning author receiving £15,000, the runner-up £3,000, and three further shortlisted authors £500 each. The announcement of the winner will be broadcast live from the award ceremony on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row from 7.15pm on October 6th.
Selected from 438 entries, this year’s shortlist expresses unexpected sides of British life. Unlike previous years where stories have ranged from Africa to New York, this year’s shortlisted stories are all based in the UK, many in parts of the country that are unsung in literature: suburban housing estates, small towns, rural Wales. From Frances Leviston’s delicate evocation of mother-daughter tensions in Broderie Anglaise to Jonathan Buckley’s poignant story of a psychic investigating a missing teenager, Briar Rose, to Hilary Mantel’s intruder who hovers at the window hoping to catch a shot at Margaret Thatcher, these stories are set firmly behind closed doors. We also encounter love in unusual forms: in Mark Haddon’s Bunny a morbidly obese young man makes an unlikely friend as his world shrinks around him, and in Jeremy Page’s touchingly comic Do It Now Jump The Table, a young man meets his girlfriend’s parents for the first time - with the added twist that the parents are nudists.
This year’s finalists come from a number of disciplines: Jonathan Buckley is a novelist and former Rough Guides editor; Jeremy Page has written for stage and screen and Frances Leviston is a poet. None have been shortlisted for the Award before.
The UK’s bestselling crime novelist, Rebus creator and award judge Ian Rankin, said: “It was great fun reading so many terrific short stories, but really tough to whittle the list down and pick a winner! The quality was matched by variety of approach and subject matter, leaving me in no doubt as to the continuing robust good health of the form.”
Ian Rankin is joined on this year’s judging panel by novelist and short story writer, Tash Aw, 2013 BBC National Short Story Award-winner, Sarah Hall, and Books Editor at BBC Radio, Di Speirs – and the panel is chaired by former BBC foreign correspondent Allan Little.
2015 sees the tenth birthday of this prestigious award, which was established in order to raise the profile of this important literary form. Buckley, Haddon, Leviston, Mantel and Page join distinguished alumni such as Lionel Shriver, Rose Tremain, William Trevor, Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith. As well as rewarding the most renowned short story writers, the Award has raised the profile of many up-and-coming-writers at a crucial stage in their career, including Erin Soros, Lisa Blower, Francesca Rhydderch and Julian Gough.
Di Speirs said: “We have come a long way in the ten years since our first BBC National Short Story Award when the short story in the UK felt endangered - not much published, read or feted, though always a core part of BBC Radio. A decade of reading the best short fiction produced here, and the rise of home-grown collections, often headlined by National Short Story Award shortlisted stories, is proof that the story is once again flourishing, constantly inventive, constantly challenging. This year’s shortlist is no exception – comic or poignant or both, they all throw the glancing light that a short story can do so well, into overlooked corners of Britain, and in a brief moment, illuminate characters we might otherwise pass by, unaware.”
