Mantel on Sunday Times Short Story longlist

Mantel and Hill among longlisted authors

21 February 2011

Man Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel and Susan Hill (Man Booker Prize judge 2011) are among the writers longlisted for the £30,000 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award 2011.

Alongside the better-known authors, the longlist, which also features Michel Faber and Tibor Fischer, includes former bus conductor Fabian Ackler and actor and puppeteer Erin Soros. The prize is open to authors of previously unpublished work or stories first published after 1st January 2010. The shortlist will be announced on 13th March and the winner revealed at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on 8th April. Each shortlisted author will receive £500.

Judge A S Byatt said: "The stories we read this year were both varied and well crafted. We had considerable difficulty in narrowing the list to 20 . . . We have the fantastic and the precisely real, the shocking and the witty, the distressing and the invigorating. We have stories by famous writers and stories by the unknown. Some are succinct and some are elegiac. All were debated with passion."

The judges are author and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, journalist and author Daisy Waugh, writer and journalist Will Self, Byatt and Andrew Holgate, literary editor of the Sunday Times. The non-voting judges' chairman is Matthew Evans, chairman of EFG Private Bank and former chairman of Faber & Faber.

The 20 long-listed writers and the titles of their short stories are:

Fabian Acker - Nirvana
Kevin Barry - Fjord of Killary
Meira Chand - The Pilgrimage
Will Cohu - East West - West Coast
Anthony Doerr - The Deep
Michel Faber - In the Woods with a Dead Dog
Roshi Fernando - The Fluorescent Jacket
Tibor Fischer - Possibly Forty Ships
Xiaolu Guo - Life by Accident
Sarah Hall - Vuotjarvi
Tobias Hill - Not that it Matters
Susan Hill - Crystal
Yiyun Li - The Science of Flight
Hilary Mantel - Comma
David Miller - Fuck Being Happy
Robert Shearman - History Becomes You
Erin Soros - BC Almanac
Louise Stern - Black and White Dog
Gerard Woodward - The Family Whistle
Clare Wigfall - Professor Arvind

Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award 2011

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