BBC National Short Story Award 2016 , livre ebook

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45 pages

English

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The characters assembled in this year's shortlist are all looking for a new start, a chance to escape or change the way they are perceived. Now in its eleventh year, the BBC National Short Story Award with BookTrust continues to showcase a literary form in the very best of health. The stories this year were shortlisted by poet Kei Miller, Man Booker Award-winning novelist Pat Barker, Southbank Centre's Literature Programmer Ted Hodgkinson, and BBC's Books Editor Di Speirs. The judging panel was chaired by Woman's Hour presenter Jenni Murray, who also introduces the collection.

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Short story

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Publié par	Comma Press
Date de parution	19 septembre 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781910974605
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Contents
Introduction – Jenni Murray

Garments – Tahmima Anam

Morning, Noon & Night – Claire-Louise Bennett

The Darkest Place in England – Lavinia Greenlaw

In a Right State – Hilary Mantel

Disappearances – J K Orr

About the Authors

About the Award

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Comma Press.
www.commapress.co.uk

Copyright © in the name of the individual contributor
This collection copyright © Comma Press 2016.

‘Garments’ by Tahmina Anam was first published in Freeman’s: Arrival © Tahmima Anam 2016 ‘Morning, Noon & Night’ by Claire-Louise Bennett was first published in Pond © Claire-Louise Bennett 2016 ‘The Darkest Place in England’ by Lavinia Greenlaw © Lavinia Greenlaw 2016 ‘In a Right State’ by Hilary Mantel was first published in The London Review of Books © Tertius Ltd. 2016. ‘Disappearances’ by K J Orr was first published in Light Box © K J Orr 2016.

The right of the authors to be identified has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, or otherwise), without the written permission of both the copyright holders and the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library. This collection is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are entirely the work of the authors’ imagination.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, organisations or localities, is entirely coincidental. The opinions of the authors are not those of the publisher.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Literature Northwest and Arts Council England across all its projects.
Introduction

As a voracious reader for as long as I can remember – the newspaper at the age of two, a good book, hiding between the fire and the loaded clothes horse to avoid washday as a teenager, a bedtime devotee of a great novel for all my life – I was never a fan of the short story.
I often compared it to a takeaway meal – temporarily satisfying, but leaving you hungry soon after you’ve finished. For me the precious time available for reading was best served by a long and gripping narrative, with a beginning, a middle and end, that might keep me intrigued for days.
It may have been connected with my day job. Presenting a daily news or magazine programme on the radio is about rapid absorption of information, communicating ideas and stories in a few short minutes and, as one programme ends, preparation for the next one begins. Maybe my reading for pleasure and relaxation needed to take place over a more sustained period.
So, I accepted the request to chair the panel of judges for the 2016 BBC National Short Story Award with BookTrust partly out of curiosity. What was it about the genre that so enthused so many of the literary friends for whom I had great respect?
Equally, would being required to read a carefully selected longlist culled from a vast range of authors – some established, some not – persuade me that the form could bring insight and delight in a completely different way from the longer work? I’m pleased and, frankly, relieved to report that it did.
From a long, long list of more than 400 entries, the panel of judges was each sent two large envelopes containing more than 60 manuscripts, ranging from 2000 to 8000 words in length. Every spare moment was spent reading and re-reading a quite spectacular variety of tales whose diverse subjects, styles and themes reveal the flexibility and confidence of short fiction now.
There were stories which drew on the lives of real people or fictional characters, ranging from William S. Burroughs, through Chekhov to Jane Eyre. There was comedy, tragedy and we were transported around the globe from Zimbabwe, into the Indian sub-continent, through South America and into the often dystopian future.
As readers we had no idea of the name of the author – we read everything blind initially – so we were basing our judgements purely on the quality of the prose and the narrative force of the story as we each selected our favourites.
There was a surprising amount of agreement when we gathered to select the five stories that would constitute the final shortlist and appear in this book and on air. I’d heard there was often blood on the table when literary judging panels gathered to make their decisions. Despite an insightful debate, happily no violence ensued.
My panel contained the wonderful novelist, Pat Barker, Kei Miller, the poet, novelist and short story writer whose novel, Augustown , was published this summer to rave reviews, Ted Hodgkinson, senior programmer for Literature at the Southbank Centre and a long standing advocate of the short story and Di Speirs, the BBC’s Books Editor, the driving force behind the prize, the woman responsible for keeping Radio Four at the forefront of the literary spoken word and a friend who’s long endeavoured to persuade me of the joy of the genre.
We narrowed our final shortlist from unsettling stories set on beaches, in the undergrowth and against northern nights but in the end, the top five became very clear to us. Although they are diverse in style and subject they share certain underlying themes. A search for love, moments of connection, poised and perfect prose, and an understanding of the human condition.
The authors who made it to the shortlist are all professional writers – Hilary Mantel needs no introduction after a long career writing beautiful novels and finally hitting the big time with her Tudor series charting the life of Henry VIII’s fixer, Thomas Cromwell.
Her story, ‘In a Right State’, will have echoes for anyone who’s waited in the casualty department of a large NHS hospital and become aware that among the sick and sad are the homeless seeking warmth, sanctuary and company. It’s written in Mantel’s typically mordant style and grows funnier each time you read it. The characters leap from the page and draw you into the community of a small, but intriguing segment of society.
In ‘Garments’, Tahmima Anam takes us movingly into the lives of the women who earn a paltry living in a Bangladeshi sweat shop. Immediately you care about Jesmin who’s ‘six shirts behind’ and laugh with her as she moves on to the panty order for the ‘foreign ladies who use them to hold in their fat.’ The women have strength even though they have no power and the story is told without a hint of sentimentality.
In ‘Disappearances’ by KJ Orr, the guilt of the central character is heavy from the outset. We’re in Buenos Aires in the company of a retired plastic surgeon as he reflects on the history of the country in which so many people suffered terribly, but in which he had an ‘easy run through the years.’ It’s a simple and astute yet devastating tale.
‘Morning, Noon and Night’ by Claire-Louise Bennett is a slow burning story which portrays loneliness and the longing which comes as a result of unrequited love. It’s witty in the most subtle way and the language is so beautiful I found myself reading it out loud over and over again for the sheer pleasure of speaking the words.
Lavinia Greenlaw’s ‘The Darkest Place in England’ took me straight back to the day we moved to a remote part of the Peak District and found the lack of light pollution wonderful, but not for a teenage girl like Greenlaw’s Jamie. She lies to her father and goes out with an unsuitable friend in a car full of boys. The writing is exceptional and the portrait of a young person taking stumbling steps towards adulthood is intensely moving.
So, I’m a convert. There’s a compressed power in a great short story which draws you in, holds you tight and then echoes in your head for a very long time after.

Jenni Murray
Garments
Tahmima Anam

One day Mala lowers her mask and says to Jesmin, my boyfriend wants to marry you. Jesmin is six shirts behind so she doesn’t look up. After the bell, Mala explains. For months now she’s been telling the girls, ya, any day now me and Dulal are going to the Kazi. They don’t believe her, they know her boyfriend works in an air-conditioned shop. No way he was going to marry a garments girl. Now she has a scheme and when Jesmin hears it, she thinks, it’s not so bad.
Two days later Mala’s sweating like it’s July. He wants one more. Three wives. We have to find a girl. After the bell they look down the row of sewing machines and try to choose. Mala knows all the unmarried girls: which one needs a room, which one has hungry relatives, which one borrowed money against her wage and can’t work enough overtime to pay it off. They squint down the line and consider Fatima, Keya, Komola, but for some reason or other they reject them all. There’s a new girl at the end of the row but when Mala takes a break and limps over to the toilet she comes back and says the girl has a milky eye.
There’s a new order for panties. Jesmin picks up the sample. She’s never seen a panty like it before. It’s thick, with double seams on the front, back, and around the buttocks. The leg is just cut off without a stitch. Mala, she says, what’s this? Mala says, the foreign ladies use them to hold in their fat and they call them Thanks. Thanks? Yep. Because they look so good, in the mirror they say to the panties, Thanks. Jesmin and Mala pull down their masks and trade a laugh when the morning supervisor, Jamal, isn’t looking.
Jesmin decides it won’t be so bad to share a husband. She doesn’t have dreams of a love marriage, and if they have to divide the sex that’s fine with her, and if he wants something, like he wants his rice the way his mother makes it, maybe one of them will know how to do it. Walking home as she did every evening with all the other factory workers, a line two girls thick and a mile long, snaking out of Tongi and all the way to Uttara