2009 Edge Hill Short Story Prize shortlist announced

The shortlist for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize has been announced. The annual Prize, which was launched by Edge Hill University three years ago, is the only competition in the UK for the best short story collection by a single author.  The Prize is co-sponsored by Blackwell bookshop.

The shortlist was announced at an event at the Writing on the Wall Festival in Liverpool.

This year's judges are James Walton, journalist and chair of BBC Radio 4's The Write Stuff; Claire Keegan, last year's winner of the Prize and Mark Flinn, Pro-Vice Chancellor of Edge Hill University.

The shortlist is:

• Chris Beckett, The Turing Test, Elastic Press
• Gerard Donovan, Country of the Grand, Faber
• Anne Enright, Yesterday's Weather, Random House
• Shena Mackay, The Atmospheric Railway, Random House
• Ali Smith, The First Person and Other Stories, Hamish Hamilton

James Walton, Chair of the judges, commented: 

‘I'm delighted to be judging the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, especially at a time when short stories are making such a comeback - as you can see from all the distinguished writers on the shortlist.' 

Ailsa Cox, Reader in Creative Writing and English at Edge Hill University, commented:

‘We're thrilled by the range and quality of the shortlist.  Some of these names are already familiar from the Booker and the Orange Prize, while others are newer discoveries.   Not many prizes put a science fiction author from a small press alongside the literary heavyweights!  I'm especially pleased that there's so much humour in the writing - another great year for the Prize.'

The winning author will be presented with the £5,000 prize at the Bluecoat, Liverpool, on 4 July.

The second prize winner and the readers' prize winner will also receive £1,000 each.  The readers' prize is judged primarily by Get into Reading, an organisation that gives people who might not normally think of joining a reading group a chance to enjoy stories and poems together.

The Edge Hill Prize for the Short Story 2009 - Shortlist

The Turing Test

These 14 stories feature, among other things, robots, alien planets, genetic manipulation and virtual reality, but their centre focuses on individuals rather than technology, and they deal with love and loneliness, authenticity and illusion, and what it really means to be human.  Chris Beckett's first story was published in Interzone in 1990, and his stories have since appeared in Britain, the US and Russia.  His novel The Holy Machine was published in 2004 by Wildside Press and his second novel, Marcher by Leisure Books, in 2008.  He lives in Cambridge with his wife and three children and lectures in social work.

Country of the Grand

Donovan's stories magnify a New Ireland as it copes with the rewards and pressures of success: immigration, mid-life crisis, adultery and divorce and a lost sense of place and history. Gerard Donovan is the author of the novels Schopenhauer's Telescope, which won the 2004 Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award and was longlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize; Doctor Salt and, most recently, Julius Winsome, described in the Irish Times as ‘a timeless fable of loss, isolation and violence.'  Born in Ireland, he currently lives in a former railway station cottage in New York.

Yesterday's Weather

Booker Prize-winning author Anne Enright presents a series of moving stories about women stirred, bothered, or fascinated by men they cannot understand, or understand too well.  Anne's first collection of stories, The Portable Virgin, won the Rooney Prize, and she has published three novels, The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like? - shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and winner of the Encore Award - and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch.  Her first work of non-fiction, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, was published in 2004.  The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize.  Anne Enrightwas born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. 

The Atmospheric Railway

A collection of 13 new stories and a selection of 23 from previous collections. The Guardian said of Shena Mackay's writing, ‘Mackay's observational precision is outstanding; she writes like an angel wielding a scalpel, dissecting her characters with sublime, sharp-edged prose.'  Shena Mackay was born in Edinburgh.  She is the author of two novellas, eight novels and four collections of short stories.  She was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for The Orchard on Fire in 1996 and shortlisted for the 2003 Orange Prize for Heligoland.

The First Person and Other Stories

Ali Smith's stories appeal effortlessly to our hearts, heads and funny bones.  Always intellectually playful, but also very moving and funny, she explores the ways and whys of storytelling.  Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962.  Her first novel, Free Love, won the Saltire First Book Award.  She is also the author of Like (1997); Other Stories And Other Stories (1999); Hotel World (2001), which was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize in 2001 and won the Encore Award, the East England Arts Award of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 2002; The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003) and The Accidental, published by Hamish Hamilton in 2005. She lives in Cambridge.

For more information on the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, visit www.edgehill.ac.uk/shortstory.

To read the article in today's Guardian online, visit www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/06/sf-short-story-chris-beckett.