Szalay doubles up at Edge Hill Prize

David Szalay has taken a double win at the Edge Hill Short Story Prize.

The Canadian author took the main £10,000 prize - given for a single-authored collection of short stories - for his collection Turbulence (Cape).

Meanwhile the same collection also took the £1,000 Reader’s Choice Award, which is voted for by students and also part of the Edge Hill Prize.

Both awards were made at Waterstones’ flagship store in Piccadilly, London on Friday 25th October.

The Prize panel included 2018 prize winner Tessa Hadley, co-founder of Galley Beggar Press Sam Jordison, and author and playwright Elizabeth Baines while the Reader’s Choice award was chosen by Edge Hill University students and alumni.

Jordison said of Turbulence: “We all just really liked it, we loved it. Emotionally it worked, I found lots of the stories really quite moving. Once you’ve read one of the stories in the collection you feel like you’ve been through a whole life, a whole world, and then realise actually it’s only a few pages. I was really impressed by the way David inhabited so many different lives and voices, which felt to me like a really brave thing to do. One of the magic things about this collection is that as a reader you feel like you’re really connecting with these people; that’s a really wonderful thing.”

Szalay added: “It feels fantastic to win the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, and I’m just as happy to win the Reader’s Choice category voted for by students. It’s really special to win an award which is judged by aspiring writers themselves; that was wonderful.”

Szalay was awarded the Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber prizes for his 2009 debut, London and the Southeast, and won critical acclaim for The Innocent and Spring.

The £500 Masters Prize for a student studying Edge Hill University’s masters in creative writing was awarded to Tamsin James. The Edge Hill Short Story Prize was founded in 2006 and is the only UK-based award for a single-authored collection of short stories.