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George Mackay Brown and Orkney

2013-04-24T09:40:54+00:00

Editor's Note: Reader in Residence at Orkney Library and Archive, Alison Miller, discusses the life of the Orkney writer George Mackay Brown. Listen to three short stories by George Mackay Brown from 28 April 2013.

Westray - Orkney. Photo by Kirsteen Cameron.

“It is the word, blossoming as legend, poem, story, secret, that holds a community together and gives a meaning to its life.” George Mackay Brown, An Orkney Tapestry, 1969

The earliest settlers here in the islands left a myriad of prehistoric monuments scattered all over, telling us that Orkney lay at the heart of the neolithic world. During Norse rule there were Viking earls, one of whom, Rognvald, built a great red cathedral in Kirkwall to honour his uncle St Magnus.

Hundreds of Orkneymen travelled to the North West of Canada in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to sign up with the Hudson’s Bay Company. One, John Rae, became a brilliant Arctic explorer, discovering the last part of the North West passage. And in two World Wars, Scapa Flow was vital in the defence of the British Isles.

All this because, as George Mackay Brown wrote, ‘Orkney lies athwart a great sea road,’ and this position has determined its story throughout the ages. It was a rich inheritance for a man who hated travelling himself, who preferred to stay in his rocking chair and set forth only on mind voyages.

Extract from The Wireless Set, a short story by George Mackay Brown read by Claire Knight.

A familiar figure round his native Stromness, the Hamnavoe of his stories, George would walk dreamily along the street that ‘uncoiled like a rope’ and absorb the old secrets and legends. Every morning after breakfast he would clear away crumbs, move the marmalade aside and settle down at his table with pad and biro to write. It was this discipline that saved his life, for in his youth, devastated by the news that he had TB, he sought solace in drink. No-one expected much of him then.

But he turned his life around and became known and loved the world over for his poetry and novels as well as short stories. And if he didn’t travel himself, his words brought many travellers to his door. Among them was the distinguished composer, Peter Maxwell Davis, who with others inaugurated the St Magnus Festival held every year at midsummer in Orkney.

Many years ago, home from university for Christmas, I caught a bus to Maeshowe, the 5000 year old burial chamber in the heart of neolithic Orkney. You have to crouch low to get inside. As I straightened up and grew accustomed to the dimness, I realised there were other folk there. One was George Mackay Brown. He wrote:

“I suppose it only happens once in a decade — a clear south-west horizon on the afternoon of the winter solstice ... The sun made a cloudless descent. The interior of the chamber was full of crepuscular whispering figures. Then the sunset flowered on the stone — the last beam of light of the shortest day — and it glowed briefly on a wall that at every other time of the year is dark.”

Somehow the man that walked among us wove the story of Orkney for us all and cast it abroad into the world.

Listen to George Mackay Brown Stories

Alison Miller: Reader in Residence at Orkney Library and Archive

Celebrating 'the Irish Chekhov': A Brian Friel Season

2013-03-08T14:30:05+00:00

Editor's Note: Scroll to the bottom of the page for the schedule of talks, plays and stories across Radio 4 and 4 Extra, to celebrate Irish playwright Brian Friel

We really should not need an excuse to celebrate the work of one of the great playwrights of the 20th and 21st century. But, being broadcasters, we do. This year, 2013, Derry-Londonderry is the City of Culture and Brian Friel has long long associations with the city; here was the prompt to revisit his work. Friel has had his work produced all over the world. Plays, particularly Translations, appear on school syllabi. He has had research centres named after him and been showered with awards. In 2009 Benedict Nightingale, the theatre critic, wrote about Friel as ‘a Wise Man of the People of the Art and, maybe, the greatest living English-language dramatist’. The New York Times declared ‘he has dazzled us with plays that speak in a language of unequaled poetic beauty and intensity.’ Such plaudits. Such admiration.

Brian Friel

Often referred to as the Irish Chekhov, the first production you will hear is actually an adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. New productions of some of his short stories sit alongside new stories from Derry writers who followed in his footsteps. And what else of his might we have in the archive that we could place on Radio 4 Extra? Of course an archive catalogue listing does not necessarily mean a programme exists; his earliest professional drama was for BBC Radio but sadly they were not kept. But other productions were. There were all the Ballybeg plays (his sequence of theatre plays about the small town of Ballybeg; Ballybeg is Irish for ‘small town’), further short stories, a feature about the ground breaking theatre company he set up in Derry with Stephen Rae, Field Day, and most exciting, intriguingly, several talks that he had recorded decades ago for BBC Northern Ireland Schools broadcasting. Brian Friel does not give many interviews, there have been documentaries about his work in which he never appears, so I urge fellow devotees to put aside a small amount of time and listen to them. And if you don’t know his work listen anyway, as a primer.

Here is the man himself talking in the 1960s and 1970s about his childhood, the power of memory (a theme that runs throughout his work), school, his family, the city of Derry. His antipathy to interviews is most wittily and self-deprecatingly illustrated in the talk Self Portrait. Friel asks himself ‘the interviewer’s chestnuts’ such as - which of your plays are your favourites, and replies, none of them. The answer to ‘Do you think the atmosphere in Ireland is hostile or friendly to the artist’ is ‘Err…I'm thinking of my lunch.’ He questions what autobiography is, how a memory can have a truth of its own even if you know it is untrue.

Derry-Londonderry

For all our technical wizardry, for all the games we can play with sound, listening to a beautiful single voice summing up and questioning a moment in time with almost poetic phrasing, a delight in words and a certain wicked wryness, can still be mesmerising.

We have shaken the dust off these old recordings and hope you listen to them with the plays and the stories.

Hedda Gabler: BBC Radio 4 Saturday 9th March 2.30pm
This is the Old Vic production, starring Sheridan Smith and Adrian Scarborough. Friel's version throws new light on its two female archetypes - Hedda, the beautiful trapped and ultimately doomed heroine; and Thea, the less socially admired, yet much freer, new woman. Both women ultimately take their fate into their own hands, in very different ways.

Faith Healer: BBC Radio 4 Extra Saturday 9th March 10.00pm
Written in the late 1970s, Brian Friel's Faith Healer is regarded as a modern masterpiece and a major influence on modern Irish writing. Its theme of memory, the stories we tell ourselves and the nature of truth run through all his work. In Faith Healer, he explores how these sometimes only shed a half light on truth. Starring Owen Roe, Lia Williams and Phil Daniels. Frank thinks his faith healing powers are waning and he has returned to his native Ireland in the hope of restoring them.

Self Portrait: BBC Radio 4 Extra Sunday 7.10am & 1.10pm
Brian Friel recorded this talk, a ‘fragment of autobiography’ in 1971. A shy man, Friel rarely gives interviews and this talk is a rare glimpse of the man himself.

The Green Years: BBC Radio 4 Extra Sunday 11th March 10.45am & 9.45pm
This talk by Brian Friel has not been heard since 1964. It is Friel’s beautiful lyrical memory of moving to Derry at the age of 10, in 1939.

Staging Ireland: BBC Radio 4 Extra Sunday 11.30am
The story of Field Day, the new radical theatre company launched in Derry in 1980 by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea amid a political climate of riots and looming hunger strikes. The first production was Friel’s Translations which can be heard later on Radio 4 Extra.

Translations: BBC Radio 4 Extra Sunday 10th March 1.30pm
It's the summer of 1833. In a hedge-school in Donegal, the schoolmaster's prodigal son is about to return from Dublin. With him are two army officers. Their aim is to create a map of the area, and, in the process, replace the Irish place-names with English equivalents. It's an act with unexpected and violent consequences. The cast includes Samuel Barnett, Dermot Crowley and Mark Bazeley.

Brian Friel Stories: BBC Radio 4 Extra: Monday to Friday 11.00am & 9.00pm
5 short stories about the everyday faiths, fears and hopes of his characters. Full of make-believe, illusion and self-deception, Friel's stories are stories of resilience and dignity, told with humour and warmth. The reader is Adrian Dunbar.

Maiden City Stories: BBC Radio 4 from Friday 8th March 3.45pm
Three new short stories, specially commissioned by BBC Radio 4 to celebrate Derry-Londonderry's status as UK City of Culture, from some of the city's leading literary figures. Seamus Deane, Jennifer Johnston and Brian McGilloway each bring us a new short story, recorded in front of an audience in the city's Verbal Arts Centre.

BBC International Short Story Award 2012

2012-09-12T13:35:00+00:00

Editor's note: The shortlist for the BBC International Short Story Award will be announced on Front Row on Friday 14 September at 7:15pm. Written by an exciting mix of authors, they reflect the very best in short story writing around the world today and can be heard on Radio 4 read by some of the nation's most popular actors from Monday 17th September. Here, the Editor of Readings for BBC Radio Drama, Di Speirs talks about the Award.

It may not have the volume of the Olympic and Paralympic arrivals, but this month a small, elite group will be arriving in Britain in search of glory, recognition and an opportunity to mingle with their peers from around the world. This year's Short Story Award is, in this Olympic year, International, and so writers from Australia to South Africa, from Bulgaria to the US are now heading for the UK, and in the running for the BBC International Short Story Award 2012.

People have asked if it's any more difficult to judge far flung stories than usual, but the truth is that the same criteria apply, it's simply that we might travel further and penetrate different worlds. And in the past writers based here, like last year's winner, the Canadian D W Wilson, or British writers who live abroad like Clare Wigfall and James Lasdun have set stories beyond these shores. Nonetheless, this year there has been a significant shift in the entries and it's been a hugely enriching experience as a reader. From an aircraft crashed in a Mongolian desert to an exiled dictator of an unnamed African state, the stories and their authors have traversed the globe.

But in the end what we are looking for remains the same. Not only excellent and engaging writing that rings true, but an original story or a story with a new take on a familiar theme, a story that bears re-reading and that lingers in the mind. Looking back over the seven years of the Award so far, I still remember all the short-lists with great clarity. Taken as a whole, the body of past short-lists provide an object lesson in the breadth of possibility that the short story offers - in shape, tone, subject and style.

I'm still haunted by both the power and shock of Michel Faber's lost and lonely down-and-out in The Safehouse, in which Faber creates a parallel universe to our own more ordered lives, and by the creeping sense of abandon that surrounds another man on the edge, in Jon McGregor's If it Keeps on Raining. Both these stories give a sense of a whole life in a few pages and invite us to look at strangers in a new light.

The successful short story intimates so much more than it says. As a listener or reader we often fill in the gaps from the clues sown. A prime of example of this can be found in the 2009 winner, Kate Clanchy, whose supremely economical portrait of a mother's love for her son, The Not Dead and the Saved, is one of the most elegant and moving stories I have ever read. It takes courage and skill to skip time but here the emotional intelligence and compassion have the depth of a much longer piece, compressed to leave an entirely satisfying experience for the reader.

Humour is a trait sadly rather underused in the entries, despite appeals for it every year! Cut with pathos though, as in Jane Gardam's The People on Privilige Hill, or used with verve and an absolute sense of the absurd, as Julian Gough did in The Orphan and the Mob, it's a powerful tool as writers from Wodehouse to Thurber knew only too well.

I could go on - to the magic of Sara Maitland's fairytale Moss Witch or the compelling voice of Jane Rogers Hitting Trees with Sticks - a single handed performance piece in itself. It is invidious to single out some stories over others but I hope they'll serve both as a reminder of all that the short story can do and as a taster for what promises to be a smorgasbord of delights as the 2012 short list - at ten rather than five this year - comes on air from the 17th of September. As this year's writers jostle on the final starting line, I hope find that each and every one, past and present, offers something captivating and enticing for you to enjoy.

Di Speirs is Editor of Readings for BBC Radio Drama

The BBC International Short Story Award

2012-01-26T17:26:52+00:00

With just a month to go until entries close for this year's BBC International Short Story Award, it's really exciting to see that the Costa Awards too are going to celebrate and reward short story writers next year. It's great news for short story writers and their audiences, and yet more tangible evidence of how radically the landscape has changed over the last decade.

When we began the campaign to launch the BBC National Short Story Award, the genre was not only overlooked, but in severe danger of terminal decline. While stories remained on air, the chances of publishing them were diminishing everywhere. I recall one of our past judges, the award winning writer Naomi Alderman, telling me she was advised by her tutor at UEA never to write a short story if she could possibly manage a novel. What publisher was really going to be interested? And how could you garner attention without prizes or earn a living without outlets?

It's beginning to feel as though the art of short story writing - a precise, honed and difficult craft that is as challenging as any novel - really is getting the recognition it deserves. And it is gratifying to have been part of what turned the tide! The BBC National Short Story Award has played a real part in changing attitudes - and there are some palpable illustrations of how the lives of some of our winning and short listed writers have been changed too.

D W Wilson, who at 26 was our youngest ever winner last year, has now had his first collection (previously only available in Canada) bought by Bloomsbury in 2012; 'Once You Break a Knuckle' published in April this year. It will sit alongside at least four other short story collections at Bloomsbury, including Jon McGregor's brilliantly titled collection 'This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You.' - a volume which contains not one but two stories which have been fantastic Runners Up.
At the same time the annual anthology of the Award's shortlist regularly sell over 2000 copies.

Meanwhile I've been having fun working with another previous winner, Julian Gough, for the second time. Two years ago we dramatised a short story of Julian's about boom and bust; this time he's written from scratch a story about the sovereign debt crisis. It may not sound a subject for humour but he's turned it into a comedy that throws a new light on the current economic situation. Listen out for it - starring Dermot Crowley, Rory Keenan and Stephanie Flanders - on the 28th February.

Tonight Tessa Hadley - one of our judges last year - celebrates the publication of her new collection Married Love. You can hear five stories from that on the new Short Story Zone on Radio 4 Extra in March; this week Lucy Wood's lovely and magical stories Diving Belles are on in the same slot, and listen out for Roshi Fernando very soon.

2012 will be an exciting year for the BBC Award - with an opportunity for writers in English from all over the world to enter in this Olympic year. This September we'll have ten rather than five short stories on air, and a chance to hear all the writers on Front Row. As the entries roll in from around the world, it's clear it's going to be a good year for the short story on all fronts, with the lovely added bonus of Costa being there too very soon.

Di Speirs is Editor, Readings at BBC Radio 4

Diving Belles: Short stories on Radio 4 Extra

2012-01-26T12:55:59+00:00

Ed's note: You can catch the last two stories from Diving Belles on Radio 4 Extra tonight and tomorrow (timings at the end of the post) but you can hear all five stories for the next five days on the Radio 4 Extra website - PM.

Lucy Wood

Paul Arnold, 4 Extra presentation producer, writes:

A commissioned programme on Radio 4 Extra is an event for us. Being primarily an archive network, we try particularly to celebrate the drama, comedy and readings that are made just for us. The other thing about 4 Extra is that with no news bulletins, we do have some time to hear from authors, actors, comedians and producers about what they've been up to.

So when I heard that we'd commissioned five readings from a new collection of short stories - Lucy Wood's debut Diving Belles - it seemed like a great chance to get Lucy in to chat about them.

At first sight, tales based on Cornish folk-lore might seem unpromising, but with the modern setting and imaginative flair that Lucy brings to them they're a captivating listen.

The opening tale describes the efforts made by an old lady to find again the husband lured away by a mermaid so many years before. As Lucy told our presenter, Susan Rae:

'I was particularly interested in the mermaid folklore. Stories particularly about men from fishing communities being lured out to sea by mermaids. I wanted to pick out the darker elements of this. Those are stories about loss, about tragedy...'

Listen to the full interview with Lucy Wood:

Paul Arnold is a producer for Radio 4 Extra

Diving Belles is on BBC Radio 4 extra this week, at 11am and 9pm and you can listen online to the series for the next five days.
Diving Belles is produced by Gemma Jenkins and Liz Allard

BBC National Short Story Award winner: DW Wilson

2011-09-29T15:40:00+00:00

Ed's note: If you're quick you can still download this year's winner DW Wilson for free from the Radio 4 podcast page as it's due to expire tomorrow - PM.

The 2011 shortlist (l to r): DW Wilson (winner), Alison MacLeod, KJ Orr, MJ Hyland and Jon McGregor

I'm not how many of us judges were conscious of the age or the gender of our five finalists in the BBC National Short Story Award when we read their stories for the first time.

Three of the writers chose to disguise their sex through the use of initials. Only later did I discover that MJ Hyland's name is Maria, KJ Orr's is Katherine, and DW Wilson is David.

We winnowed them out - and also Jon McGregor and Alison MacLeod - from a long list of over forty, picking their stories as the most intriguing, impressive and memorable. And perhaps as the freshest too - two of the finalists are strictly speaking still students.

DW Wilson receiving the award from Sue MacGregor

I won't easily forget the look of joy on the face of David Wilson when he heard his name announced live on Front Row on Radio 4 on Monday evening in the Free Word Centre in Farringdon - or the burst of delighted approval from our young and enthusiastic audience.

It was a great evening out for all of us. As I think you may notice from the pictures.

Sue MacGregor is chair of judges, BBC National Short Story award

Hear the announcement of the winner from the BBC National Short Story Award ceremony on Front Row. Details of next year's competition will be released in December.
The awards are run in conjunction with Booktrust. You can download (PDFs) last year's shortlisted entries for free from the Booktrust website.
The shortlist was announced on Front Row and you can hear interviews with the shortlisted writers on the Front Row website.
More about the Award, the finalists and past winners on the Radio 4 website.
Read BBC National Short Story award pits award-winning writers against students in The Guardian

The National Short Story Award: Listen to and download the finalists

2011-09-15T15:00:00+00:00

Editor's note: The BBC National Short Story Award in partnership with Booktrust is in full swing. The shortlist was announced last week and this year as well as hearing the finalists on the radio you can download them as podcasts to listen to whenever and wherever you want: in the gym, on the way to work, last thing at night. Links and full details are at the end of this post. Here BBC producer Di Speirs, a regular on the judging panel, casts her eye over the shortlist - PM.

It's that time again - after all the secrecy and non-disclosure agreements, the private mulling and the public musing of the first judging meeting, the casting and recording, our five short-listed short stories have been revealed on Front Row last Friday and the first of our authors interviewed on the show.

So how was the 2011 selection of stories?

Did they dwell on austerity, bemoan the economic troubles of the globe, or celebrate the flowering of democracy through social networking? Were the interesting times we live in reflected in the tales we judges were told? By and large, not really!

Impecunious living and politics did get some mention (and one of our stories does delve deeply into being a "have-not") but the universal theme that united this year's most exciting entries, and was true for many of those stories we couldn't put through, was a timeless one.

The workings of the heart sit at the centre of all the short listed stories - fulfilled, rejected, heart-felt, heart-sore, it's all there. Beyond that unifying factor though the angles are very different and there will be, I am confident, considerable debate next week when we choose the winner.

Last week I was at a BBC talk on how we handle science on television and radio. I couldn't, given the news was still secret, reveal that two of this year's short-listed stories are steeped in two of the most exciting developments of the twentieth century, heart surgery and space travel, and arguably are doing just that job of throwing a new light on scientific advancement that fiction can do so well.

Meantime the stories are going out on air - we judge them on the page, but of course translating a story to another medium is always a fascinating and challenging process. What you may lose in the word count replaced by what an actor can bring.

This year is no exception - with some wonderful performances from stellar names like Tim Piggott Smith and Indira Varma and newer voices like Lydia Wilson, who has been garnering praise for her theatre and television work, and Trevor White, one of the most versatile Canadian actors working here and Mike Sengelaow, a New Zealander by birth but an able if hapless young Australian in Rag Love.

This moment in the award is in some ways my favourite. All five writers are receiving due praise and lots of exposure on air. They are all reaching new audiences and I feel personally, they are genuinely all winners. I'm already hoping they will feel encouraged to pen more short fiction, and indeed hoping that they will enter next year!

Di Speirs is Editor, Readings at BBC Radio 4

You can download the five shortlisted stories as podcasts once they've been broadcast to keep.
You can also listen to the finalists online on the Radio 4 website.
The shorlist was announced on Front Row and the shortlisted writers are being interviewed this week. You can listen online.
More about the Award, the finalists and past winners on the Radio 4 website.
Read BBC National Short Story award pits award-winning writers against students in The Guardian

More on the Radio 4 schedule changes: Short stories

2011-07-20T17:08:35+00:00

From 1949, archive caption reads: "Miss Stevie Smith, poet, one of the finalists in the BBC Third Programme Short Story Competition, reading her story Sunday at Home"

Some concern has been expressed about the reduction in the number of short stories on Radio 4 from next April; we will broadcast 100 rather than 150. I wanted to explain my thinking behind this decision - taken very much in the context of the overall schedule changes for the Autumn which I announced last week.

Above all I want to make it clear that Radio 4 is committed to broadcasting new writing and new writers and my plans for the network very much reflect this reality.

Radio 4 aims to broadcast more of "the best that has been thought and said in the world", in the words of Matthew Arnold. This brilliant analysis of culture as an active force is very much the text that inspires me as controller. Culture and Anarchy was written in the most turbulent times of the nineteenth century as science displaced certainty so the echoes of Arnold's thesis ring particuarly true now.

And this aspiration lies behind our choices in the annual Radio 4 commissioning round which is just drawing to a close. We will soon have commissioned 500 out of 1,365 ideas for broadcast next year. Many more will be commissioned on a rolling basis throughout the year.

Each year Radio 4 broadcasts 13,000 programmes. We have just signed off on 22 plays by first or second time writers to radio in the Afternoon Play slot and over 60 pieces of new writing for 2012/13 across all our drama slots - and there will be more to follow as we have an ongoing commitment to commission nearly 150 original single plays in the afternoon drama slot alone.

We will commission 100 short stories each year, some of which will also be broadcast on Radio 4 Extra. In the autumn on Radio 4 Extra we will introduce a new short story slot each day Monday to Friday for archive stories and a limited number of new commissions.

We have just announced the Alfred Bradley Bursary for new writing in the North and we will broadcast the winner on Radio 4. We plan to join up with the World Service and support the International playwriting competition, again broadcasting winners on Radio 4.

We will continue to support the BBC National Short Story Award and broadcast winners across the week on the network - look out for the judging line-up which will be announced next week.

I hope that my Autumn schedule changes will inspire and engage listeners.

There will be a new prime-time science programme at nine in the morning presented by the physicist Jim Al-Khalili, a new interview programme called One to One designed around the passions and interests of presenters, new comedy for Sunday night, including new programming from some of the most talented writers and comedians working today like John Finnemore, Rory Bremner (repeated from Thursday night with new satire), Sue Perkins and others.

The World At One, presented by the formidable Martha Kearney, will be extended to forty-five minutes to take account of the extraordinary news agenda, both national and international. WATO, as we call it, has felt increasingly hemmed in at thirty minutes. Stories now develop faster and need a fresh eye by lunchtime. Parliament sits in the morning now and WATO needs to cover emerging issues. This leaves too little time, in my judgement, for other stories.

One of the results of extending the World At One, as I mentioned in my blog when I made the announcement last week, is that the number of short stories on Radio 4 has been reduced. We will still broadcast around 100 short stories on Radio 4 from April 2012 rather than 150, which is the current number. Some of these will also be broadcast on the new Radio 4 Extra short story strand.

My plan is to showcase the Short Story on Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra as much as I can.

Other programmes have also been affected by the schedule changes on the network such as, for instance Americana, which has been decommissioned. In essence, I have made the editorial decision to add an hour and a quarter of programming each week and thus need to make space in the schedule.

I do want to make it clear that my commitment to writing, new writing and the BBC National Short Story Competition on Radio 4 remains. I am proud that Radio 4 is the place where most new writing is commissioned and broadcast and I fully intend to keep it that way.

Gwyneth Williams is Controller of BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 4 Extra

Telegraph: Why radio is the ideal home for short stories
Guardian: Please, BBC, don't cut short your short stories
BBC Press Office - Autumn changes to Radio 4 schedule
The Radio 4 schedule
The full caption for the picture from teh archive reads: "BBC Third Programme Story Competition: Stevie Smith : Sunday at Home 20/04/1949 © BBC Picture shows Miss Stevie Smith, poet, one of the finalists in the BBC Third Programme Short Story Competition, reading her story Sunday at Home, broadcast on Wednesday, April 20th 1949."

The BBC National Short Story Award 2010

2010-11-15T14:10:11+00:00

It's been a strange week, locked in a studio recording a novel about secrets and conspiracy in Stalinist Russia and then dashing 8 floors up, to conspiratorially huddle over the short list of this year's BBC National Short Story Award intent on ensuring total secrecy until the announcement on Thursday's Front Row.

There is a sense of both relief and excitement now that we have reached this point. Relief to have finally got through all the hurdles, from the box loads of entries in the spring, to the complications of contracts in a digital age, from the casting of Cumbrians to the challenges of the short-listing meeting. This year the judges seem to have been particularly passionate in their defence of, or coruscating in their demolition of, some entries! And for the first time we felt we must add a commended category for stories from Edna O'Brien and Graham Mort.

There have naturally been various minor alarms along the ways - a couple of the stories are brilliant and don't need to be abridged - in fact they are written with such economy in their totality, that they are too short for our 30 minute slot! Unfazed by this potential hiccup we have come up with two solutions - the wonderful Irish writer Colm Toibin has promised to reveal his favourite classic short stories after David Constantine's clever and concise tale on Monday, and kindly Gardeners' Question Time will take up the slack on Friday before Hugh Quarshie reads Aminatta Forna's tender story of a love remembered and lost.

The casting was trickier too, with several stories with first person narrators and specific regional or age requirements. Sarah Hall's powerful coming of age story is deeply rooted in north Cumbria and the lovely people at The Theatre by the Lake in Keswick have helped us find the perfect voice. Meanwhile Helen Oyeyemi's story is deliberately unplaced - she told us 'the village itself I feel much more vague about - it could even be Muslim rural Africa, but an Iraqi accent would be true to the story too.' Of course for radio such ambiguity is hard. We have to fix on a voice and thus a suggestion, at least, of place - see where you think Sirine Saba is speaking from.

In these multi-platform days of youtube and twitter we have to find pictures for radio - always an odd idea given we spend our lives saying that radio creates the best pictures! For David Constantine's story Rob Howells has been delving into the picture archives in search of Morecambe Bay - which did appear eventually but only after he'd viewed over two hundred pics of Eric and Ernie. Water and floods resonate through Jon McGregor's poignant and disturbing portrait of a lonely man too. The continuity of the river below his dwelling was the pervading image.

There have been a lot of wonderful trails on Radio 4. Not normally one to step in front of the mike, preferring to lurk on the other side of the glass, I have found myself on air at the most surprising times. It was particularly disconcerting to be drifting off to sleep last night thinking I recognised the actor! But amusing to learn that one of my team, rather groggy and half asleep, leapt out of bed on hearing the Big Brother voice of his leader coming out of the radio at 6.30 in the morning.

Finally, however, it is exciting to be at this point again - with the five stories about to be made public, a chance for the audience to join our debate on Facebook before what I predict will be a polite but fiercely fought tussle at the final judging meeting for the winner. And then of course we'll all be sworn to secrecy all over again until the 29th. Good thing I'm picking up tricks on enforcement from my current recording!

Di Speirs is Editor, Readings at BBC Radio 4

The shortlist was announced by James Naughtie on Thursday's Front Row. David Constantine, one of the shortlisted authors, was interviewed by Kirsty Lang on Friday's programme.
Listen to the five shorlisted stories on Radio 4 at 1530 each afternoon this week, starting today with Tea at the Midland by David Constantine.
More about the awards, including past winners, on the Radio 4 web site.
You can download all five of the shortlisted stories to keep after they've been transmitted.
The hashtag for The Awards is #NSSA
The picture shows The Midland Hotel in Morecambe Bay. It's by Ted and Jen. Some rights reserved.

Words and pictures from the National Short Story Awards

2009-12-10T08:55:25+00:00

The nice people at Book Trust have sent us some pictures from the awards ceremony Monday night - and there are more here on Flickr.

Shortlisted Lionel Shriver's got an excellent piece about short stories in The Independent. She writes:

Exchange Rates, short-listed last month for the National Short Story Award, was the first proper short story I've written since I was 22. While a couple of other "stories" have been published meantime, they were both, sneakily, excerpts from novels.

And in The Times, Margaret Drabble, a judge, writes:

Short stories aren't just very short novels, although a few celebrated writers, including John Updike and Alice Munro, have published volumes using overlapping characters or imagined neighbourhoods that create an effect of a tapestry of interwoven lives -- not a continuous novel, but a series of episodes, cumulatively evoking a time or a place or a way of life.

Book blogger Elisabeth Baines (Fiction Bitch) likes the winner:

...short stories, as I'm frequently saying, are closer to poetry than novels, and this short story bears all the hallmarks of that: a linguistic attention and the structural and verbal patterning at which Clanchy as a poet is supremely practised, and it is these elements which create the control of emotion and tone for which this story has been rightly praised, and make it so moving.

Charlotte Williams, blogging for The Bookseller, is particularly pleased with the podcast:

Perhaps a small thing in itself - and of course Radio 4 has long been a champion of the form - but this podcast could be seen as part of a bigger scheme: with short story collections notoriously difficult to sell in print, maybe people are waking up to the different ways to get the form out there?

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

The winner was announced live on Monday's Front Row.
Story is a campaign for shorter stories. It's run by Book Trust, co-organisers of the awards.

Shrt stry awrd - anncmnt Mnday

2009-12-03T16:48:38+00:00

Editor's note. Update: of course, the award has now been announced. Kate Clanchy is the winner. The Telegraph covered the announcement, as did The Guardian. Congratulations to Kate Clanchy! - SB

Not long now until our final meeting in a discreet London venue, to pick this year's winner. Which isn't going to be easy at all.

Meantime, not only are the stories going out on air each day at 1530 and available in the normal 'listen again' fashion - as are the five interviews with the authors on Front Row - but for the first time, and for two weeks only, we are able to offer the five stories as a podcast and as downloads for your MP3 player. It's very easy to do - just visit the series' podcast page where you'll find directions. Either subscribe to the podcast and get all five stories delivered to your MP3 player or right-click to download each story to your computer directly - to keep forever.

And the animated video clips, are all still available here. It's proved an interesting process finding visuals which reflect but don't distract from the audio - and my colleagues Rob and Hannah have done an excellent job I think. You can also check out Naomi Alderman's blog where she has written a lovely piece on her native Hendon.

And for those of you who prefer to read the stories in the old-fashioned way, Short Books have just published a beautiful anthology containing all five and an introduction from our Chair Tom Sutcliffe, which is available in all good book shops, and a perfect treat for Christmas.

As for me, I'm just going to re-read the stories one more time.

Di Speirs is Editor, Readings at BBC Radio 4

In the press, chair of judges and Front Row presenter Tom Sutcliffe wrote a hymn of praise to the short story for The Independent. Alison Flood in The Guardian remarked on the all-female shortlist. Janice Turner in The Times notes that although she can't remember her cleaner's second name, shortlisted author Kate Clanchy can and has written a whole book about hers. The South Yorkshire Star notes with pride that shortlisted author Jane Rogers teaches at the region's Sheffield Hallam University and the Manchester University press office is pleased to point out that faculty member Dr Jennifer Rowntree helped Sara Maitland with her shortlisted story The Moss Witch as part of 'a unique collaboration between scientists and authors'.
The winner will be announced live on next Monday's Front Row at 1915.
Story is a campaign for shorter stories. It's run by Book Trust, co-organisers of the awards.

The BBC National Short Story Award

2009-11-27T19:45:00+00:00

Hurrah! At last. After all the waiting, and the reading, and the deliberating we have at last reached the moment when we can reveal this year's short-list of five contenders for the BBC National Short Story Award (BBC NSSA). These five have survived the turbulent and exacting examination of first our teams of sifters and then, for those that made it through the first hoop, intense discussion and dissection by this year's judges - the writers, Dame Margaret Drabble and Helen Dunmore, the broadcaster Tom Sutcliffe, the singer-songwriter Will Young, and me.

The process of judging is a fascinating and sometimes unsettling one. As the summer progressed I read through my teetering pile of short stories. There were very short stories and those that almost tipped the 8000 word limit; there were first person monologues, futuristic visions, time travellers, llamas, historical adventures and not a few, often moving, parent-and-child stories. There were relationship breakdowns and tender endings to long marriages; a man who disappears, literally, in a fancy dress costume, a woman who disappears through the ice, an artist's glove that reappears as art. This year the quality of the writing and the names of the writers who now take this award seriously, were more impressive than ever.

Filtering the pile of sixty odd stories down to a long list is hard; conceding personal treasures and reaching a consensus on our final five took most of a pleasurable autumn's afternoon but of course one of the joys of this experience is re-assessing stories and uncovering new depths. Passionate defences of certain stories moved them up our list; general approval was not, in itself, sometimes enough. It was the most good-natured judging meeting I've been involved in but very rigorous as we debated futuristic feminism, and whether a monk's pursuit of an orphan over four pages qualified as a short story - even if it was wonderful writing (it almost did!), and, was too much plot actually a disguise for a proto-novel?

The other four judges are even now pondering and re-reading the final five and discussing them in the press - but in the Readings Unit a large part of the job only kicks in once we can get on with turning beautiful writing into equally beautiful radio. Casting the right voice is always the key element in production - these five stories were gifts - we set off in pursuit of the best of British and to everyone's joy secured just the actors we were after.

We needed someone to capture the nuances of North London's Hendon community - Miriam Margolyes is starring round the corner from Bush House (where we live) in Samuel Beckett's 'Endgame' - she was happy to emerge from her dustbin to read Naomi Alderman's 'Other People's Gods'. Julia MacKenzie abandoned the acuity of Miss Marple for the confusion of the protoganist in 'Hitting Trees with Sticks' by Jane Rogers - in a monologue of Bennettian perception. Two of our favourite and most long-standing of readers were instantly perfect casting for their two very different stories; Hannah Gordon has flavoured Sara Maitland's magical mix of science and witches with a heady Highland density in 'Moss Witch', and Penelope Wilton displays her customary restraint and compassion in Kate Clanchy's moving and original 'The Not-Dead and the Saved'. However it is probably fair to say that there was most excitement amongst the team here over the re-jigging of studios to fit in with the latest Harry Potter filming schedule, so that Jason Isaacs could transform briefly from the sinister Lucius Malfoy to a hapless middle-aged American son in Lionel Shriver's 'Exchange Rates'.

And now the whole experience is gathering speed as we head towards the culmination of our work - and the revelation on Monday 7th Dec of this year's winner. As well as a chance to hear the stories on air, there's the build up to the award ceremony, and terrific coverage of the short story genre and the award with interviews with Will, Tom, Margaret and Helen on air and in the press; Julian Gough, winner of the 2007 award, is tweeting, and for the first time, we have gone multi-platform. More on that on Monday - meantime Will Young and Tom Sutcliffe reveal the short-list and discuss the stories on tonight's (Friday's) edition of Front Row. They are a great selection - we hope you enjoy hearing them next week. And wondering which one will win.

Di Speirs is Editor, Readings at BBC Radio 4

The shortlist was revealed on this evening's Front Row, presented by Kirsty Lang.
Full details of the BBC National Short Story Award on the official web site.
The animated reading above is an excerpt from Other People's Gods by Naomi Alderman. View clips from the other shortlisted stories here.