Preston author Jenn Ashworth has been shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award.

Jenn is a Betty Trask Award winner, and she has been nominated for her story ‘Flat 19’.

Advertisements

Jenn Ashworth is a Professor of Writing at Lancaster University and her story is a highly original and humorous ‘skewering of middle-class pretension’ and exploration of the ‘sometimes stultifying demands of a long marriage’.

Read more: Hidden note found in Harris building roof vent

The story is narrated by Eve, a successful artist who is also a wife, mother and daughter. Struggling with being all things to all people, she finds an ingenious way to solve the problem by cloning herself.

Inspired by Doris Lessing’s short story, ‘To Room 19’, which explored the competing demands on a middle-class woman in the 1960s, and Ashworth’s pandemic experiences balancing work and home schooling her children while her partner worked for the NHS, the story asks how much has really changed for women and what makes us who we are?

The shortlist was announced on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row show on Thursday 15th September. The list is dominated by five of the UK’s most original and imaginative writers, heralds a ‘new vanguard of British writing’ drawn from different disciplines – from music to poetry to crime writing. 

The judges praised the shortlist for its inventiveness, exuberance, and compassion, with stories inspired by lived experience of inequality, chronic illness, sexual fluidity, and the pandemic.

Read more: Rainbow-themed Women’s Institute craft and produce show coming to Garstang

The BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University 2022 shortlist is:

·   ‘And The Moon Descends on the Temple That Was’ by Kerry Andrew  

·   ‘Flat 19’ by Jenn Ashworth

·   ‘Long Way to Come For a Sip of Water’ by Anna Bailey

·   ‘Green Afternoon’ by Vanessa Onwuemezi

·   ‘Blue 4eva’ by Saba Sams                                                           

The BBC National Short Story Award is one of the most prestigious for a single short story, with the winning author receiving £15,000, and four further shortlisted authors £600 each. The 2021 winner of the BBC National Short Story Award was Lucy Caldwell who won for ‘All the People Were Mean and Bad’.

The 2022 winner will be announced live on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row on Tuesday 4 October 2022.

All five stories will be broadcast on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds and published in an anthology by Comma Press. The readers of this year’s stories include Olivier award winner, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, who reads ‘Green Afternoon’; two-time BAFTA nominated Shameless actress, Maxine Peake, reading ‘Flat 19’; The Imitation Game’s Tuppence Middleton, reading ‘Blue 4eva’ and House of the Dragon actor, Matthew Needham reading ‘And The Moon Descends on the Temple That Was’. The Batman and Heartstopper actor, Joseph Balderrama completes the line-up reading ‘Long Way to Come for a Sip of Water’. 

Read more: Thousands sign Lancashire books of condolence for Queen Elizabeth II

Elizabeth Day, Chair of the 2022 BBC National Short Story Award Judging Panel, said: “A good short story says something meaningful. A great short story keeps certain things hidden. The best short stories find their power on the page precisely because of what the author has decided not to say.

Advertisements

“Our five shortlisted stories are fine examples of this talent. Their subject matters are varied – step-families, road-trips through America, AI clones, a post-apocalyptic love affair, and urban knife crime – but they are connected by a surety of touch.

“Every one of these writers has taken great care to choose the shining details that arrest our attention, to inflect their paragraphs with precision and unique lyrical flair without ever losing grip on the pace or purpose of the story in question. These stories represent the new vanguard of British writing and I am confident that the future of the short story is in safe hands.”

Elizabeth Day is joined on this year’s judging panel by Costa First Novel Award winning novelist Ingrid Persaud; writer, poet and editor, Will Harris; Booker Prize shortlisted novelist and Professor of Creative Writing, Gerard Woodward; and returning judge Di Speirs, Books Editor at BBC Audio.

The BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University was established to raise the profile of the short form and this year’s shortlist join distinguished alumni such as Zadie Smith, Hilary Mantel, Rose Tremain and William Trevor. As well as rewarding the most renowned short story writers, the Award has raised the profile of new writers including Ingrid Persaud, K J Orr, Jo Lloyd, Cynan Jones and Clare Wigfall.

Dr Midge Gillies, Academic Director, Creative Writing, University of Cambridge, Institute of Continuing Education, said: “The shortlist offers the diversity of voices and themes that we have come to expect from the BBC National Short Story Award. Hearing these stories read on air, or reading them on the page, will be an inspiration for both writers and readers. The shortlist provides a checklist of writers to watch for the future as each of the shortlisted authors seems destined to leave their mark in some way.”        

See what’s happening near you by entering your postcode below or visit InYourArea

Read more: See the latest Preston news and headlines