Fiona Marshall wins V S Pritchett Memorial Prize 2016

Fiona Marshall has won the £1,000 Royal Society of Literature V S Pritchett Memorial Prize 2016 for the best unpublished short story.

Judges Aamer Hussein, Peter Kemp and Sara Taylor selected Marshall as the winner for her short story "The Street of Baths".

Kemp called the story "an outstandingly atmospheric tale of exile that brilliantly conjures up a lost city and its way of life".

He said: "Smells, sights and sounds recalled with intense sensuousness evoke a now-vanished Barcelona. As the narrator, a Catalan expatriate in England, remembers her uncle, a Catalan patriot who stayed on in the city’s Gothic Quarter after the Civil War, the story – alive with vivid detail – beautifully blends nostalgia, affection and melancholy."

For Hussein, the story "evokes memories of war, dispossession and the slow building of new shelters for life’s refugees: in rich, deft strokes 'The Street of Baths' compresses a blighted chapter of history into a few poignant pages".

Taylor said: "'The Street of Baths' lives in the space between what is and what might be, playing with the ambiguity of memory while exploring the difficult territory of family history, painting a portrait of a man and his experiences in vivid language that isn’t easily forgotten."

Marshall is the author of Absence, a novel about epilepsy. Her short stories have been commended in the Manchester Fiction Prize and the Bridport Prize. The winning story will appear in The RSL Review and will be published in Prospect Magazine.