Wednesday August 24, 2005
The Guardian.

The world's richest prize for a short story - £15,000 for the winner, £3,000 for a runner-up - was launched at the Edinburgh book festival yesterday. All I can say is, about time too. The British attitude to the short story - that it is somehow lesser, a practice space for the real thing, which is, of course, the novel; that you can perhaps start out writing a collection of stories, but you have somehow failed if you don't graduate to a minimum of 200 pages - has always baffled me. I cannot comprehend the underlying assumption that a particular kind of stamina is somehow better, of more value. It's like privileging the marathon, or the 1,500m, over the 100m. In a short story, every word, every turn, every fillip, every thought, matters. It's a quality of concentration hard to sustain over a novel and demands a comparably higher quality of concentration from the reader. It has been said before but I'll trot it out again; a short story is prose's equivalent of the lyric poem. You could say that the short story is like a polished miniature, except that that carries unwelcome suggestions of tweeness. Short stories can be rough, cruel, heartbreaking, big-hearted, yet still polished to a sheen that brings out every grain and whorl. The short story is a test of prose-writing in a way a novel often isn't, or isn't necessarily. "It's possible, in a poem or short story," wrote Raymond Carver in a 1981 essay republished in the September issue of Prospect, "to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine." And by polish I do not mean sanitised: Colette's world, for example, is harsh, full of damaged, limping people; the stories feel ragged, uncertain, like slightly drunken anecdotes, but every word is in the right place. What does "short" mean, anyway? Carver's story Popular Mechanic, collected in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, is not quite two pages long. The series of Dave Eggers stories published in the Guardian's Weekend section recently ranged from 250 to 600 words. Alice Munro's The Love of a Good Woman, at 60 pages, or Mavis Gallant's The Pegnitz Junction, at 90, nudge into novella territory. But even at this longer end of the scale, you can usually read them at a gasp, which means they exist whole in your mind, like an unusually clear and well-expressed thought. (I know these are North American examples, but it is there where, as Eggers points out in his introduction to The Best of McSweeney's Volume I, there "are probably over a hundred high-quality literary journals", that the short story is truly alive; disdain for the form is a British phenomenon.) If they're good, short stories resonate far beyond their size. Because a story is short, it does not mean it is not also big, whole worlds contained in a grain of sand, vertiginous infinities opening at the twist of a sentence. Munro's story What Is Remembered, about a woman who is unfaithful one afternoon, yet chooses to use the knowledge as a secret to sustain her throughout her marriage, is a perfect case in point. William Boyd, writing about the short story in this paper recently, quoted Updike: "More closely than my novels ... these efforts of a few thousand words each hold my life's incidents, predicaments, crises, joys."

See the rest of the article here:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1555268,00.html

<Added>

Here's another article at the BBC Radio 4 website:

It says, "This new award is a collaboration between NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), BBC Radio 4 and Prospect magazine, and it's funded by NESTA. It is administered in conjunction with Booktrust and Scottish Booktrust. The first winners will be announced in May 2006."

and

"The National Short Story Prize will be the largest award in the world for a single story. The winning award is worth £15,000, and there will be a runner up award of £3,000. Three further shortlisted authors will receive awards of £500 each."

Here's the (possible) snag:

"The National Short Story Prize aims to celebrate our finest writers of short stories and is open to authors with a previous record of publication who are either UK nationals or residents. Entries may be stories published during 2005 or previously unpublished."

Also at this site there are links for an entry form and terms and conditions.

Here's the URL:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/frontrow/short_story_prize.shtml

Jailbirds are ineligible!

lol -- I saw that! We'll have to be on our good behaviour if we want to enter!