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Joanna Trollope to chair BBC Short Story award
Author Joanna Trollope is to chair the judging panel for the £15,000 BBC National Short Story Award with BookTrust.
Trollope is joined on the judging panel by Baileys Prize for Fiction winner Eimear McBride, IMPAC Award winner, short story writer and academic Jon McGregor, Encore Award winner Sunjeev Sahota and returning judge Di Speirs, books editor at BBC Radio.
The winning author will be presented with £15,000, and four further shortlisted authors will receive £600 each. Submissions will be accepted online beginning from 9am Thursday 26th January 2017, with the deadline for entry at 9am Monday 6th March 2017.
Trollope said: “It’s an enormous pleasure and honour to be chairing the BBC Short Story Award for 2017. I am a huge fan of the short story as a genre, not least because it manages to create such a peculiarly intimate relationship between writer and reader, and I believe that relationship to be immensely important to good writing. There is nothing like a short story, really, to humanise literature, from the greats of the past – Chekov, de Maupassant, William Trevor – to the greats of the present. It is wonderful to see the genre revive as it has, in no small part thanks to awards like this one. And the revival has revealed many hitherto unknown talents in this far from easy, if rewarding, genre. I look forward so much to reading the entries for 2017 – who knows what we will discover?”
Di Speirs, editor of Books at BBC Radio and judge of the Award since its launch, added: “I’m hugely excited about the twelfth BBC National Short Story Award – we have a wonderful panel of judges and given the great discoveries and delights of past years, I confidently predict there will be a huge range of stories, inspirational, entertaining and challenging, in our reading pile. I am really looking forward to reading authors new and old, and to bringing their work to BBC Radio 4’s eager audience of short story lovers.”
The shortlist will be announced on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row at 7.15pm on Friday 15th September 2017 (subject to change). Readings of the shortlisted stories will broadcast on BBC Radio 4 from Monday 18th to Friday 22nd September and the stories will be published in an Award anthology by Comma Press. Interviews with the shortlisted writers will air from Friday 15th September 2017 on Front Row. The announcement of the BBC National Short Story Award 2017 with BookTrust winner will be broadcast live from the Award ceremony on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row from 7.15pm on Tuesday 3rd October 2017.
Last year’s winner was K J Orr for her story 'Disappearances’ with previous alumni including Lionel Shriver, Zadie Smith, Hilary Mantel and William Trevor.
