News: Edge Hill Prize result and new publications

Lots going on for me on the short story front right now. On Friday we held the Edge Hill Prize Award event in Waterstone's Piccadilly, and announced our winner, chosen by yours truly, last year's winner Tessa Hadley, and writer, journalist and publisher Sam Jordison: David Szalay for his stunning collection of linked short stories, Turbulence. As Sam Jordison said afterwards, these seemingly brief and extremely stylish stories, hinged on the fleeting connections between people on plane journeys, magically pack in whole lives and poignantly inhabit the experiences of an amazing span of characters. David also won the Reader's Prize, which is judged by students and alumni of Edge Hill University, for a single story from the same collection.

And as Tessa Hadley said, when she announced the prize, we had a very long discussion and a very hard decision to make when we met back in September in the foyer of London's Tavistock Hotel: all of our shortlist were wonderful - Wendy Erskine's Sweet Home, which gives us a whole world of present-day Belfast via a fantastic ear for speech and an enviable linguistic dexterity; Vicky Grut's collection of great humanity and empathy, Live show, Drinks Included, which at the same time offers a sometimes Kafkaesque vision of contemporary society; Chris Power's Mothers, which takes us on geographical and existential journeys and displays his great gift of showing through language how memory and the past affect our present-day experience and often the trajectory of whole lives; Simon Van Booy's The Sadness of Beautiful Things, which brings the joyous surprise of being about good heartedness; and Lucy Wood's The Sing of the Shore, a haunting collection set in out-of-season Cornwall, the atmosphere of which lingers long after you've finished reading.


Meanwhile, my story 'Kiss', first published in MIR Online, has been selected from Best British Short Stories 2019 to appear in The Barcelona Review, and I'm finally able to announce that my story 'Saying Nothing', which was longlisted in the V S Pritchett Prize last year, is also a finalist and judge's honourable mention in this year's Tillie Olsen Award, announced today and published in The Tishman Review. And I've been writing a commissioned story for an anthology due sometime in the future from an exciting new press, Inkandescent.

Edge Hill awards

So Kirsty Gunn won the Edge Hill award for her superb, moving and technically brilliant collection of stories, Infidelities. After having read and loved her book, I was chuffed to meet her at the awards ceremony last week, as well as to meet again Madeleine D'Arcy, whom I'd briefly met last year at the Vienna short story conference, and who won the student readers' prize for a story in her sizzling collection, Waiting for the Bullet (sorry the photo is blurred):

 I would hate to have been a judge of the shortlist, though: the other four books, by Carys Davies (The Redemption of Galen Pike), Annaliese Mackintosh (Any Other Mouth), Toby Litt (Life-Like) and Rose Tremain (the American Lover) were all wonderful, as I said here. It was lovely too to meet Annaliese and Toby, and to see Carys again, whom, as a fellow Salt writer, I have known for some time (and whose book I reviewed here.) I always love this event - a celebration of the short story, and a rare chance to meet up with some of the best story writers of our time. Kudos to short-story expert and writer Ailsa Cox for founding and administrating the prize!

Edge Hill Awards

Great night last night at the Edge Hill Award ceremony in London's Free Word Centre. I couldn't possibly have been rooting for any book in particular: the fabulous all-women shortlist included three books I've already been championing: A (Andrea) J Ashworth's Somewhere Else, or Even Here (Salt) which had already won the Scott Prize, Zoe Lambert's The War Tour (Comma) - both of which I nominated for the Readers' section of last year's Guardian First Book Award - and Sarah Hall's The Beautiful Indifference which I recently reviewed enthusiastically. The other two shortlisted books, which I hadn't read, were Tessa Hadley's Married Love (Cape) and Rowena MacDonald's Smoked Meat (Flambard). In the event, Sarah Hall won both the overall prize and the Readers' prize (judged by Edge Hill Creative Writing students). Congratulations to her, and to all the shortlistees. A truly lovely evening - a real hub of the short-story world, with a chance to catch up with short-story writers such as Adam Marek, Carys Bray,  judge and last year's winner Graham Mort, with mine and Andrea's publisher, Jen Hamilton-Emery, and with Ailsa Cox, my former co-editor on metropolitan magazine, who founded the prize. Here are some of them listening as judges Graham, Suzi Feay and Professor Rhiannon Evans talked about their difficulties in choosing from such a strong list. (Sarah Hall second from left, Jen Hamilton-Emery fourth from left, next to her Andrea Ashworth and Andrea's partner writer James Wall, Adam Marek in the check shirt and on his left and third from right Tessa Hadley.)

Here are Zoe and Andrea:

And here's a photo Jen took in the pub afterwards of Andrea, me and James: