Sams wins £15k BBC National Short Story Award

Saba Sams has won the 17th BBC National Short Story Award for "Blue 4eva", a story about sexual identity, agency, power and class, taken from her debut collection Send Nudes (Bloomsbury).

The BBC National Short Story Award, run with Cambridge University, sees the winning author receive £15,000, and the shortlisted authors get £600 each. 

Sams was presented with the prize on 4th October by chair of judges Elizabeth Day at a ceremony at BBC Broadcasting House. The news was announced live on BBC Radio 4’s "Front Row". 

Praised for its "utter truthfulness" and "authentic portrayal of the dynamics of familial relationships", Sams’ tale is about a newly blended family’s summer holiday. It was inspired by Sams’ memories of her own childhood holidays on Formentera and features 12-year-old Stella as she navigates the powerplay between her voyeuristic new stepfather, 18-year-old stepsister Jasmine, and Jasmine’s best friend Blue. 

The story was first drafted when Sams was a 19-year-old creative writing student. Originally from Brighton, she holds a BA in creative writing from the University of Manchester and an MA in creative writing from Birkbeck, University of London. Her work has been published in Stinging Fly, Granta and Five Dials, among others and she was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize in 2019. Her debut collection Send Nudes is also shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize 2022.

“It’s very special to have ’Blue 4eva’ – a story I’ve been working on, in one way or another, since I was 19 – be given this kind of esteem," she said. "I first wrote ’Blue 4eva’  in rainy Manchester when I was a student, though it was very different then. The story was very short, more of a vignette, but I had fun with it. 

"When I was writing Send Nudes a few years later, I returned to the story and started working on it again. I’m always thinking about what it looks like to be a young woman: about bodies and power, about friendships and family, about the ways we’re constantly looking to break free. ’Blue 4eva’ engages with sexuality too, particularly with queerness, in a subtle way that I found interesting to write."

On the judging panel, Day was joined 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.

Day said: "When I first read ’Blue 4eva’ , I was engrossed by its transportive atmosphere, its masterful telling of complex family dynamics and the sense of building tension. Saba Sams is adept at wrongfooting our assumptions, creating a set of unique, multi-dimensional characters with rich internal lives, and viewing it all through the lens of a 12-year-old girl. It’s such an achievement to be able to do that in under 8,000 words. I loved this story from the moment I read it and can’t stop thinking about it even now. I’m delighted we found such a worthy winner."

Sams beat off competition from a shortlist including composer, performer and writer Kerry Andrew, professor of writing at Lancaster University and Betty Trask Award-winning novelist Jenn Ashworth,  thriller writer Anna Bailey and short story writer and poet Vanessa Onwuemezi.

Each of the five shortlisted stories are available to listen to on BBC Sounds and are also published in an anthology BBC National Short Story Award 2022 with an introduction by Day, published by Comma Press. 

Speirs added: “We loved the freshness and the spirit in the writing of ’Blue 4eva’ – Saba Sams not only brilliantly captures the nuances of blended family dynamics, the jealousies and stresses, the efforts and the rejections, but she gives her young women credible and laudable agency and energy. 

"We recognised them and laughed with them. We were delighted too, to discover that we had chosen a writer who has already, at 26, created such an exciting body of work that she has published her first short story collection. This award has always sought to reward excellence and dedication to the unique and challenging form of the short story and this year’s winner more than fulfils our ambition.”

Alongside the BBC NSSA, the eighth annual BBC Young Writers’ Award with Cambridge University, an award created to inspire and encourage the next generation of short story writers, was also announced. The award was won by Elena Barham from Barnsley for "Little Acorns". Set in the 1940s, Barham wrote the story when she was 16, originally as the start of a novel. Her story is also available on BBC Sounds.