Onwuemezi and Sams on shortlist for £15k BBC National Short Story Award

Vanessa Onwuemezi and Saba Sams are among those shortlisted for the £15,000 BBC National Short Story Award alongside crime novelist Anna Bailey, Betty Trask Award winner Jenn Ashworth and 2018 shortlisted composer, performer and writer Kerry Andrew. 

The award is run with Cambridge University and is one of the UK’s most prestigious for a single short story. Each shortlisted author will receive £600. Organisers said this year’s shortlist heralds a “new vanguard of British writing” drawn from different disciplines – from music to poetry to crime writing. The judges praised the shortlist for its inventiveness, exuberance, and compassion, with stories inspired by lived experience of inequality, chronic illness, sexual fluidity, and the pandemic. 

Andrew is nominated for “And The Moon Descends on the Temple That Was” alongside “Flat 19” by Ashworth, “Long Way to Come For a Sip of Water” by Bailey, “Green Afternoon" by Onwuemezi and “Blue 4eva" by Sams. 

All five stories will be broadcast on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds and published in an anthology by Comma Press. The 2022 winner will be announced live on BBC Radio 4’s “Front Row” on 4th October. 

Elizabeth Day, chair of the judging panel, said: “A good short story says something meaningful. A great short story keeps certain things hidden. The best short stories find their power on the page precisely because of what the author has decided not to say. Our five shortlisted stories are fine examples of this talent. Their subject matters are varied – step-families, road-trips through America, AI clones, a post-apocalyptic love affair, and urban knife crime – but they are connected by a surety of touch. Every one of these writers has taken great care to choose the shining details that arrest our attention, to inflect their paragraphs with precision and unique lyrical flair without ever losing grip on the pace or purpose of the story in question. These stories represent the new vanguard of British writing and I am confident that the future of the short story is in safe hands.” 

Day is joined on this year’s judging panel by Costa First Novel Award winning novelist Ingrid Persaud; writer, poet and editor, Will Harris; Booker Prize shortlisted novelist and Professor of Creative Writing, Gerard Woodward; and returning judge Di Speirs, books editor at BBC Audio. 

Speirs said: “This year’s shortlist is particularly exciting – for me the award is always about discovery and I love finding exuberant, original and truly imaginative writing. Alongside their youth and their already impressive track records our five writers share these qualities and more. Their characters and settings jump off the page and while the tone, style and certainly the subject matter are wideranging, there is freshness and humanity in every story here. I can’t wait to hear them read on air or see them published – it’s a collection which speaks to our times of uncertainty and stress but offers hope and consolation.” 

The 2021 winner of the BBC National Short Story Award was Lucy Caldwell who won for “All the People Were Mean and Bad”.