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Ford takes V S Pritchett Short Story Prize for second time
Writer and translator Emily Ruth Ford has become the first person to win the £1,000 V S Pritchett Short Story Prize twice.
After scooping the award last year for her tale, “The Hikers”, she has now taken it again with “Please Be Good To Me”.
The 2018 judges of the Prize, which is awarded for the year’s best unpublished short story, are Tibor Fischer, Irenosen Okojie and Leone Ross praised her “tender, heart-warming” story.
Ford beat off fellow nominees in the form of Waterstones bookseller Aoife Inman, Early One Morning author Virginia Baily, short story writer Michelle Wright, freelance writer Juno Baker and writer and journalist Flora Carr.
Of the winng story, Ross said: “It sneaks up on you; what seems a simple meeting between strangers builds and builds into a tender, almost painful tale about vulnerability and what humans can and should do for each other. The writer asks us to slow down, to see each other’s smallness, to ask important questions about community. Restrained, timely and dare I say, important.”
Fischer described it as “a simple, but clever story about London and us. An everyday incident at a busy London station that forces the reader to be there”.
Okojie said: “It is a tender, heart warming tale on the complexities of ageing, the perils of finding your way and the perseverance of the human spirit.”
Ford is a writer and translator living in London. She studied English at Oxford University and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, and spent ten years as a journalist for the Times and Agence France-Presse, with postings in China and India.
