BBC national short story award shortlist offers a 'festival of ideas'

Judges for the BBC national short story award have announced a shortlist for 2017 that is “enduring, bold, humane and moving”, with work from five acclaimed writers now in line for the £15,000 award.

Will Eaves’s “quiet and horrifying” Murmur, about a gay academic who is convicted for gross indecency, was inspired by the real-life tragedy of Alan Turing. Eaves, a novelist, poet and former arts editor of the Times Literary Supplement, is one of the finalists for the prize, which has been won in the past by authors including Sarah Hall, Julian Gough and David Constantine. More than 600 stories were submitted, with judges unaware of the authors’ names until they made their selection.

Chaired by the novelist Joanna Trollope, three of the judging panel’s choices had made Granta’s list of the 20 most promising writers under 40 in 2013. Jenni Fagan was picked for The Waken, set on a small Scottish island where a girl is attending her hated father’s funeral, Benjamin Markovits for The Collector, about an eccentric man mourning his wife on the Canadian border, and Helen Oyeyemi for If a Book Is Locked There’s Probably a Good Reason for That, Don’t You Think?, in which her protagonist arrives for work in an office with a mysterious locked diary.

“Applying for a prize like this is like putting a message in a bottle – you don’t expect it to come back. And then it does, and it turns out someone has read it … and more people will get a chance to read it now. It feels like a bit of very good luck,” said Markovits of his shortlisting.

Trollope described Eaves’s story, which was inspired by the life of Alan Turing, as “quiet and horrifying … deliberately restrained in the writing, which only emphasises the dreadfulness of the narrative”. A reader “becomes utterly absorbed in this visceral world of legend” in The Waken, according to Trollope, while The Collector is “beautifully written [and] atmospheric”, and Oyeyemi’s contender is simply “brilliant”.

The shortlist, which was announced on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row on Friday, is completed with Cynan Jones’s The Edge of the Shoal, in which a canoeist who sets out to scatter his father’s ashes finds himself struggling to survive. Trollope called Jones’s story a “lyrically, poetically written account, lit with poignancy”.

Trollope’s fellow judge, the Baileys award-winning novelist Eimear McBride, said the shortlist presents “a veritable festival of ideas about identity, the innate and the capacity of both for transformation … or not”.

“These are stories about what is hidden, what is revealed, what can be lost and what will remain. While they inhabit very different imaginative, linguistic, political and artistic landscapes, these are the ideas that bind them together and have made each one such a pleasurable discovery for me,” said McBride.

BBC Radio books editor Di Speirs said that the award had received more entries than ever before this year, and that “writers of all persuasions – novelists, poets, short-story specialists – are seeing the value of short fiction and experimenting with it more boldly”.

“All five of our shortlisted writers have embraced the freedom that short fiction offers and all their stories sing out, enduring, bold, humane and moving. However different in style and shape, they prove just how exciting and current the short story is in the UK just now.”

In an introduction to an anthology of all the shortlisted short stories, to be published by Comma Press, Trollope wrote that “short stories are fiendishly difficult to get right”.

“At its best, a short story starts a process of thinking and imagining for a reader, a trigger, if you like, for all kinds of future thoughts and wonderings,” she wrote. “I’m proud to say that this year’s shortlist has achieved precisely that – characters, places and ideas that will linger with you long after you have finished reading.”

The winner will be announced on 3 October.