Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2011 - the winners

Last night the 2011 Edge Hill Short Story Prize was awarded in Blackwell's Charing Cross bookshop.

Graham Mort won the main prize for his collection 'Touch'.



Tom Vowler won the readers' prize for his collection 'The Method and Other Stories'.

Avril Scott won the MA prize for her story 'The Limitless Possibilities of Life'. And Claire Massey's story 'Marionettes' which will be published by Nightjar Press in 2012, was commended by the judges

It was a lovely evening. All of the shortlisted authors were present except for Graham who was teaching writing in Uganda. I met writers Michele Roberts, Polly Samson, Tom Vowler, Elizabeth Baines and Alison MacLeod for the first time. Jeremy Dyson who won the main prize last year announced the 2011 winners, and Helen Simpson was there too, but I didn't get chance to speak to her which may have been a good thing considering how star-struck I was last time I met her.

I also met two of my favourite short story writers again: Adam Marek and Rob Shearman. I was extremely excited to hear that Adam is working on short stories for the rest of 2011 following his Arts Foundation Fellowship and during the course of the evening I somehow managed to separate Rob from a copy of his brand new collection 'Everyone's Just So So Special' (actually, he gave it to me because he is lovely and I grasped it tightly in case he changed his mind). I can't wait to begin reading it.

After the award ceremony I stayed up until the early hours reading the final chapters of my friend Jenn Ashworth's new novel 'Cold Light' (fantastic story-telling and characterization; well worth the tiredness today). This morning I had a look around the British Museum's Treasures of Heaven exhibition which was delightfully macabre and resulted in dozens of scribbled notes on my tube timetable. Before Ailsa Cox and I caught the train back to Southport I bought a huge box of Krispy Kreme donuts which means that my children love me tonight and a couple of other things are also making me smile: I had my PhD admission viva on Thursday and I'm in! I was also successful in my application to be an Associate Creative Writing Tutor at Edge Hill; I start in the autumn.


Photographs of Tom, Avril and Jeremy are from the Edge Hill website.

Helen Simpson and Jane Feaver.

On Saturday I attended a reading by Helen Simpson and Jane Feaver.

Jane read a story called 'Dancing on a Pin' from her collection Love Me Tender which was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. Love Me Tender is described as a 'daisy chain of stories' in a review here and 'Dancing on a Pin' comes in for particular praise in this review. I haven't read Jane's writing, but I enjoyed her reading.

Helen read two stories from her collection In-Flight Entertainment, (reviewed here) 'The Festival of the Immortals' and 'Dairy of an Interesting Year.' It was really interesting to listen to Helen read. She reads in a measured, contemplative way. Despite having read both stories more than once, I was lost in her words and surprised at the time when the reading finished. Afterwards I asked her to sign In-Flight Entertainment for me. She thanked me for buying it and I gauchely informed her that I have every one of her short story collections. It was hard not to sound like Annie Wilkes after that, so I thanked her for signing the book and left.

The Word Dress.

Last weekend I went to the Lancaster Litfest to watch Claire Massey of New Fairy Tales read a brand new fairy tale wearing a dress made entirely out of the pages of books.

The dress was just the sort of thing that I might have imagined as a little girl (along with swimming in a lake of strawberry milkshake and other fantastical and physically impossible feats).

I took sons 2 and 3 with me and they both agreed that the dress was incredible - an admission which was refreshingly genuine and didn't have to be prised out of either of them. They also agreed that Claire's story was very enjoyable and son 2 explained to me on the way home what he thought a dress of 'smoke and feathers' might look like (such a dress features in the story).

Here is Claire's account of the event, complete with gorgeous pictures.

The event was mentioned on the BBC website.

I'm travelling back to Lancaster tomorrow to see Helen Simpson and Jane Feaver at the Litfest - I can't wait, Helen Simpson is one of my favourite authors ever.

Having 'a couple of children' at 14 is not a good idea.

For me, 1990 was a year spent humming Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares to You and Maria McKee’s Show Me Heaven. It was a year of homework and daydreaming about an as yet hard to imagine adulthood. More significantly, it was the year that Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the year of poll-tax demonstrations. It was the year that Iraq invaded Kuwait and the year Margaret Thatcher resigned. It was also the year that I first fell in love. In 1990 I was fourteen and according to Hilary Mantel’s comments in the telegraph, ready to have a baby. Mantel insists: ‘I was perfectly capable of setting up and running a home when I was 14, and if, say, it had been ordered differently, I might have thought “Now is the time to have a couple of children and when I am 30 I will go back and I'll get my PhD.”’

After I’d finished laughing, I had the following thoughts. In order to begin a PhD aged 30, Mantel’s 14 year old self would need to complete GCSEs, A Levels, an undergraduate degree and a postgraduate degree. That’s 8 years of education to catch up on while simultaneously raising a child/children. Fortunately, when I started having my children aged 21, I already had GCSEs and A Levels, leaving me with just 4 years of education to catch up on before beginning the PhD: lucky me, I had a head start on Mantel’s 14 year old -easy peasy then - NOT (as 14 year olds like to say).

The first decade of motherhood rattled my brain into a wibbly jelly of tiredness, a sort of mummy miasma that made it difficult to read and even think at times: dividing myself into four (see left) was tricky at best. No author that I have come across portrays the stultifying effects of motherhood better than Helen Simpson. Perhaps Mantel might benefit from reading some of Simpson’s short fiction. Simpson’s collection of stories entitled ‘Hey Yeah Right Get a Life’ captures all the frustration and demands of motherhood in beautiful, observant prose. Simpson also captures the wonderful moments: 'he climbed into bed and curled into her…gazed into her eyes and heaved a happy sigh. They lay looking at each other, breathing in each other’s sleepy scent; his eyes were guileless, unguarded and intent, and he gave a little occasional beatific smile'.

Aside from the personal cost of early motherhood and the resultant juggling of aspirations and familial responsibilities, there is often a physical cost associated with early child bearing. USAID works to provide education and contraception to adolescents in the developing world. Research shows that: ‘Increasing the age at first birth for a woman will increase her chances of survival. Currently, pregnancy and childbirth complications are the leading cause of death for women 15 to 19 years old in developing countries. Children born to mothers in their twenties are fifty percent lower risk of dying by their first birthday than children born to teenaged mothers. Young mothers are not often physically mature enough to deliver a baby, leaving her and her child at risk for death or disabilities from obstructed labor, fistula, premature birth, or low birthweight.’

In addition to these dangers, teenage mothers are more likely to face a life of poverty than older mothers. In a BBC news article, Hilary Pannack of the sex education charity Straight Talking said that, ‘Teenage parents statistically are much more likely to become parents of children who themselves become teenage parents. That means generations of child poverty, which we need desperately to tackle.’

1990 was the year I selected my GCSE options, it was the year that hurricane force winds killed 39 people in England and Wales and fortunately, it was not the year that I gave birth to my first child – in 1990 I was too busy being a child, which is how I believe it should be.

(Here is a short story by Helen Simpson.)